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Sept. 22, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:33:00

2490 The Moral Hazard of the Zeitgeist Movement - Sunday Call In Show September 22nd, 2013

Stefan Molyneux answers listener questions and discusses finding your audience as a writer, promoting your business, being honest with those in your life, asking the right questions of potential romantic partners, the falsehood of brutal honesty, the zeitgeist movement, avoiding moral responsibility and a reminder that facts are not friends of delusion.

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	Good morning, everybody.
	It is the 22nd of September 2013, which is most important because it is T minus two days.
	T or B, really B minus, birthday minus two days.
	On Tuesday, I will be 47 years old.
	And that is kind of mind-blowing.
	I am now, what is that?
	Not really.
	Yeah, I guess halfway through next year I'll be close.
	I'll be tipping towards 50 rather than 45.
	And I still don't feel a whole lot older than about 12 and a half.
	Physically, that's really what I'm working with.
	So I hope you're having a wonderful week, everyone.
	I know we've got a lot of callers today.
	And thanks to those who expressed interest in hearing the Joe Rogan interview, which was really a fantastic amount of fun.
	It's going to be out soon.
	They have the better audio.
	We have a backup recording.
	They have the better audio.
	We're going to wait for them.
	And video.
	Don't forget about that.
	Yeah, we have video as well, so we're going to be putting that together.
	But we want to do that with their better audio, so we'll be putting that together.
	And thanks again to Joe for inviting me to the UFC. Last night it was very, I guess, brave of him to invite me into the ring.
	Really?
	The fact that I'm calling it a ring rather than an octagon, does that indicate the truthfulness of that particular narrative?
	Yeah, it probably does.
	Anyway, so it was really a lot of fun.
	And tomorrow, Peter Joseph and I will be debating the merits of a resource-based economy.
	I think we share a lot of criticisms of contemporary culture.
	And our solutions are probably quite different in that I don't really have a solution other than let's stop pointing guns.
	But it will be certainly interesting to have a chat.
	So with that said, let's move on to the callers.
	Alright, first person via phone is Josh.
	Let's add him in.
	Hey, good morning, Ms.
	Mallieu.
	Hello, hello.
	How are you doing?
	Excellent, excellent.
	I was just calling to see if I could get a couple answers to my questions.
	Go for it.
	Yes, go ahead.
	Alright, my first question was I'm actually writing a piece.
	And I was just wondering if you, as a very successful author, had any insight on ways to keep my ideas straight.
	I have no problem getting my ideas on the paper.
	It just gets all jumbled up.
	I mean, is there any organizational methods that you know of that you could pass my way?
	And is it a book length or is it an article length or what you weren't writing?
	I'm actually attempting a book.
	It is my first one.
	I've tried it before, but I actually started over like three times.
	So I'm hoping to get a little farther this time, if not finished.
	And why do you want to write a book?
	Well, quite frankly, mostly I find it highly therapeutic to write, but also I find that the best way to learn is to teach.
	Also, it has a lot to do with keeping myself sharp.
	I feel like a bit of an island right here, just due to what I do.
	I don't have a whole lot of contact with what I like to read and write about.
	So, in essence, I guess it's just a way to keep in touch with ideas and, I guess, disseminate them to the world.
	Yeah, I mean, because there's two different things that you're talking about, which is sort of important, right?
	Before you can figure out how to organize something, I think you need to know what the purpose of it is, right?
	What I would suggest is if you're talking about writing, you know, to keep yourself sharp, to organize your thoughts, because you find it therapeutic, then what you're really talking about is journaling, right?
	And journaling, by its very nature, does not need to be organized.
	Go ahead.
	But that's what you said.
	I mean, that's what you said.
	Part of it was a significant portion of it before.
	I mean, therapeutic in the sense that it's relaxing.
	It's just something that I do for...
	For entertainment, I mean, some people they fish, some people they hunt, some people they, I don't know, they go skiing, sledding, whatever.
	I like to write.
	Right, but what I mean by that is it's a hobby, right?
	I would suppose so.
	Well, am I wrong?
	I mean, if it's for you, then it's not really a book, it's a journal.
	Not necessarily.
	Go ahead.
	I mean, if it's not written with the specific intention of other people to read it for their edification or education, then it would be...
	You might call it a book or whatever, but it's not written for the consumption of others, right?
	No, I would digress.
	My last point that I put out there, I think we're going to put four out there, is for information dissemination.
	I want people to, I guess, come in contact with ideas.
	Okay, but see, the reason I'm asking this question is if your book is for other people to learn something, then your comfort, your therapeutic, your whatever, doesn't matter.
	The only thing that matters is does it work in terms of other people Consuming it.
	Does it connect with them?
	Does it educate them?
	Does it work from the...
	So let me give you an example.
	So if I say, well, I paint pictures because it relaxes me and I enjoy it and so on, right?
	Then I don't have to worry about what people want to buy or where to sell it or what they're going to look for or anything like that.
	I'm just going to go and paint and that's kind of it.
	It's just a hobby for me, right?
	And then people say...
	Sure.
	If I say, well, what should I paint?
	Or how should I paint?
	I'd say, well, no, it's your hobby.
	I mean, paint whatever makes you feel happy.
	But if you were to say, well, I paint because I want to hang my pictures in an art gallery and sell them, then that's a different matter entirely, right?
	Yes, I see your point down.
	Right.
	So if you are focusing on a book that you want other people to consume, and you want them to pay you for it, You know, I'm kind of divided by that.
	I mean, I really, really like the idea of information dissemination.
	I mean, tokenism, I guess, in its purest form is an absolutely wonderful idea to me.
	But, I mean, ideally, just like anyone, I like money.
	Well, I mean, of course, yeah.
	If anything, I think I would probably, most likely, I would probably release it.
	Right.
	And the reason that I ask that question is if you are writing so that other people will read it, then the important thing is that they read it, right?
	And that they finish it and so on.
	And the best way...
	To get someone to read and finish a book is to have them pay for it up front because then they've already sunk some investment into it and then they're going to finish it.
	Now, I mean, I'm fully aware that I don't release my books that way, but I do in hardcover.
	But that's not how I release my books.
	We'll talk about that if you're even remotely interested sort of later on.
	But price is the test of interest.
	When you give stuff away for free, I mean, People will take it.
	When you go to the supermarket, they have those little samples of like weenies and spicy cheeses and Greek yogurt and stuff like that.
	And you'll probably have some if you're feeling kind of snacky.
	But whether you're actually going to become a regular buyer of the weeners or the spicy cheese or the Greek yogurt is probably an entirely different matter.
	Like 99 people probably try that stuff for every one person who becomes a regular buyer of it.
	So releasing stuff for money is Because it tells you whether or not people are actually interested as opposed to, well, here's a free e-book.
	I'll download it.
	Maybe I'll read it someday.
	It doesn't tell you whether your work has value.
	And so that is sort of my suggestion.
	Now, if you're going to work for other people...
	To read, that you want other people to read, then you have to put aside your therapy, your comfort, your relaxation, your whatever, and focus entirely on the audience experience, which means you have to write with the idea, like when you journal, you don't have to worry about whether other people know X, Y, or Z before, like if they come and read your journal, right?
	Because it's for you.
	But if you're writing something for the general public, Or maybe for a specific audience, but let's just say the general public.
	If you're writing something for the general public, then you have to assume that they know nothing about what it is that you're doing, right?
	So when I wrote Everyday Anarchy, which is a sort of introduction to voluntarism for the general public, I assumed that they knew nothing about it, and I had to do every analogy that I put into that had to relate to something that the audience already knows.
	Now, I don't need to write a book introducing anarchism or voluntarism to myself, and I don't need to say, well, I guess...
	I guess voluntarism is kind of like X or Y or Z or whatever, right?
	Because, I mean, I already know what it is.
	But for the everyday audience, you kind of have to assume no knowledge.
	You have to build the knowledge box slowly in an enjoyable way.
	You have to always connect a new concept to something they already understand as a way of hooking into an existing knowledge base that they have.
	And so, like, everybody knows that the government takes money, From lobbyists and in return is more likely to give favorable legislation and that those contracts can't be enforced because they're actually not legal.
	You can't specifically do that.
	And so making the case that this is an argument as to how we don't need the government to enforce contracts because the government runs on unenforceable contracts, well that's a way of helping people to understand the validity of where we're coming from.
	Helping people to understand that it doesn't matter how things are done in a free society.
	It only matters That we follow the moral principles that we all inflict on kids and each other and all that, which is, you know, don't hit, don't steal, and so on.
	So if you're writing for the general public, it has to be entirely around their edification.
	And that's sort of why I wanted to untangle what's for you and what's for them.
	Now, you will get pleasure, of course.
	I'm not saying be selfless.
	You will get pleasure.
	But you will get pleasure to the degree that people find your work valuable and illuminating and so on, right?
	Like somebody posted on my YouTube channel the other day that they were 15 when they read Everyday Anarchy and their life has never been the same.
	I mean, that's fantastic.
	I get those emails all the time.
	Just by chance, I happen to click on one of your videos and now I've watched hundreds and my mind is blown and my life has changed and all that kind of stuff.
	And I mean, I measure that in terms of donations have something to do with that because donations are a measure of how impactful what I'm doing It is.
	And if everyone sent me those emails but nobody sent me any money, then I would get that my show was not having an impact because my show is about acting with integrity and exchanging value for value and so on.
	And so that's – I know that people are getting it.
	If they consume a lot of my stuff and then they send me some money, I know that it's actually having a tangible effect.
	Now, how the Federal Reserve is bad and then people don't send you money and maybe a bunch of people download it, but how on earth are you going to measure whether it's actually changing anybody's actions or choices?
	I guess if you hold a huge rally and a whole bunch of people come based on the book, that would be one thing, but that's not particularly likely.
	So anyway, I just wanted to point out that you really, really need to focus on the audience specifically.
	And to do that, you have to figure out who your audience is.
	Are you writing for the general public?
	Are you writing for more specific audiences, right?
	So everyday anarchy is an introduction that people can hand around.
	It's short.
	It's non-technical.
	I hope it's somewhat entertaining.
	And then practical anarchy is generally designed to be read after.
	Everyday Anarchy, so that you don't have to make the case for anarchy as a whole, but you can talk about how it might be implemented in a free society.
	Actually, you can't really implement anarchy, but you know what I mean.
	You have to have an idea before you figure out what's in your book and how to organize it.
	You have to know who your target audience is.
	Let me throw that question over to you.
	Who is the target audience?
	Age, demographics, level of education, level of income, level of leisure time, and all that kind of stuff.
	Who are you looking to target with your work?
	Well, quite frankly, the general public, but the problem I have is that the things that I really write about, I think it would fall most closely under the, I guess, the canopy of political science or philosophy,
	but the problem that I'm running into is that the idea that I'm trying to express, it's almost like I either have to go with the An established vocabulary to convey these ideas accurately that I want to put out there.
	But that in itself, I think, would alienate a lot of people because it turns out to be, I wouldn't say highly technical, but you definitely have to know your way around certain subjects.
	And if I go with that, I mean, like I said, it will alienate a lot of people, but then if I I guess, establish my own vocabulary.
	I'm afraid it'll become so ridiculously ridiculous that no one is really, really going to want to read it unless they're a stuffy man smoking a cigar and drinking sherry.
	I mean, it's just...
	Well, at least those guys can afford the books.
	It's almost like a lose-lose.
	What was that?
	You know, nothing.
	Well, okay, so then you have a challenge, and it's an interesting challenge, which is you want to convey new ideas to people, and you don't want to use existing terms or words because they have the opposite meaning, right?
	Yeah, I was just going to say it's not necessarily the opposite meaning.
	It's just highly technical.
	I mean, it's sort of like that...
	That whole thing with law, I mean, people, they assume they know what it is, but once you pick up, let's say, black law, it's like your entire vocabulary is turned upside down, and things mean really something else.
	It's kind of one of those situations.
	A lot of these things have highly, I guess, technical definition that is not necessarily your normal usage.
	Yeah, I don't really get what you mean when you say they all have technical descriptions.
	There's always a simpler word for things, right?
	You don't say, hey, look, I just saw a Carcharidon Carcharius.
	It's like, whoa, that was a big great white shark, or something like that.
	There's always simpler ways to do it.
	So the reason I called it everyday anarchy and practical anarchy is because what do people think that anarchy is?
	It's some remote crazy thing that's completely impractical, right?
	So no, it's everyday.
	It's not remote.
	It's something you live everyday and it's practical.
	So, practical anarchy is like egalitarian racism.
	It just doesn't make sense to people, and hopefully it's curious.
	And there's tons of things that you can do that's technical with regards to political science, but so what?
	I mean, your challenge then is to find a way to communicate your ideas in intelligent laypeople's terms, and it's been done by tons of people before.
	I mean, look at John Locke's Second Treatise on Government.
	Look at Plato's Republic.
	And the works of Aristotle and Hobbes.
	These were all non-technical books with great language that were consumable by the educated public.
	So, I mean, it's been done by millions of people before.
	You have to find a way to connect and interest people.
	In what you're doing, the idea that these terms are too technical, well, there's always a better word to use or a more accessible word to use for whatever it is you're talking about.
	So, again, that's the challenge, is forget the technical.
	And, of course, the whole point is not to look – I mean, I'm not saying you would, but the whole point of writing about challenging topics or philosophical topics to a general audience is you don't want to look smart, right?
	And there's a temptation, right?
	So, when I was doing the Joe Rogan show on Friday night, I started drifting off into a couple of technical philosophical terms and I catch myself.
	It's not the audience's expertise.
	So I was like, oh, sorry, that's just bullshit technical stuff.
	And go back to finding a way to connect to where the audience is.
	And the whole point is to make the reader feel smart, right?
	Not to show...
	You know, like when I was in theater school, we always, oh, if I can cry on stage, then I'm a really great actor.
	And all the experienced directors call bullshit on that.
	So it doesn't matter if you're crying on stage.
	What matters is the audience is crying, right?
	So if you're focusing on you rather than the fact that you're acting for an audience, then you're missing the connection with the audience that will actually transmit the emotion.
	So it's all about making the audience cry.
	It's all about making the audience think.
	It's all about making the audience feel smart and curious and challenged.
	And it doesn't have anything to do with Your technical terms or anything like that.
	It's just about what you can evoke or stimulate in the audience.
	Yes.
	Now, once you have that...
	That makes perfect sense.
	Oh good, okay.
	Yeah, so once you have that...
	Oh, yeah.
	So once you have that, you have an idea of who your audience is going to be.
	Let's say, in general, you're going to be trying to reach men.
	Well, men are going to respond to different kinds of writing in general than women are.
	It doesn't mean that it's 100%, blah-de-blah-de-blah, but there is – if you look at the writing in Maxim, Versus the writing in Cosmopolitan, you know, I guess they're both talking about orgasms but from slightly different perspectives.
	But there is – so let's say you're trying to reach men who are in their 20s, who are college educated, who are unfamiliar with your particular view or your particular set of arguments.
	Then the first thing you need to do is figure out what they believe already, right?
	So what knowledge base are they coming from?
	So, of course, if you know anyone – Who's in the category that you're trying to reach?
	Then go talk to them or go read the kinds of magazines or the kinds of books that they read.
	So Ben Shapiro is a writer who's really enjoyable and he writes for this particular age group.
	He writes for a college teen – sorry, like really smart teens or college educated 20s, largely men.
	And so you can pick up a bunch of his books and read and he's done a lot of research and you can follow his lead about what people know and what they don't.
	And you can go to websites that are frequented by this demographic and figure out what their knowledge base is, talk to people and so on.
	So you need to get to understand Who your audience is.
	It's why I didn't start off with books.
	I started off with articles and podcasts, which I did for several years before starting to write books.
	The reason being that I needed to really understand the audience before I started firing books at them or at other people.
	And so that was sort of important to me.
	So you get to know your demographic and get to know what they know, what they don't know, what they're interested in, what they're not.
	Which analogies are going to work for them?
	I mean, I think that's really important.
	I remember making a reference to a video game, I think the top video game player in the world, I can't remember his real name, but his screen name is Fatality.
	And I made a fatality reference in some podcast.
	Like I got, I don't know, tons of emails from younger listeners like, wow, I can't believe you know who fatality is.
	You know, like it connects because that's a reference that they understand, which is why, you know, I'm taking up skateboarding and body surfing at Korn concerts.
	No, I missed my references completely.
	I probably did.
	Anyway, but – and really getting into Josh Groban just so that we can really connect at that crooner level.
	You don't even know who Josh Groban is, do you?
	No.
	Mike is my reference to one.
	Josh Groban?
	Oh, man.
	If you know who Josh Groban is, you won't get the corn reference and vice versa.
	He's a dewy-eyed Canadian singer who sang with Celine Dion, and he's a good crooner, a very good singer, actually.
	And anyway, so Michael Bublé?
	Bubbly?
	No?
	All right, anyway.
	So yeah, you just get to know the references so that you can connect with the audience and all that kind of stuff.
	And now once you know who the audience is and what their reference set is and what their lexical set is and all that kind of stuff, then you can begin planning your book.
	Right?
	It's all ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, pull the trigger, hit the target, right?
	And so it's a lot of research, it's a lot of talking to people, it's a lot of figuring things out that you're probably not particularly...
	I mean, if you're writing for your own age group and your own set and all that, then of course a lot of this stuff is done for you, but...
	Generally, if you're looking to communicate ideas, then trying to talk to people who are younger is usually slightly better.
	I apologize to all the people who are in their 60s who've changed their mind based on what I was saying, who are now going to email me and say, but, but, but.
	Absolutely, it's true.
	It certainly is true that some people in their teens buy Viagra, but you just don't see them in the commercials, right?
	So yeah, it's just all about research.
	And then once you know what your message is, how you're going to communicate it, who your target audience is, and so on, then you just start building your chapter titles, right?
	The best way to organize a book is through chapter titles, right?
	Just this chapter is this, and then give yourself no more than two sentences to describe...
	The chapter and then you can see if it builds nicely and then you can give it to people to review without the content of the argument.
	There's this way of putting forward the argument makes sense and you can reorganize it based on their feedback and so on.
	And then you write a couple of paragraphs about each chapter and then you give that out to people who've agreed to review your book or hire an editor.
	I mean that's a really important thing to do if you're new to the writing gig.
	Hire an editor.
	Be serious about it.
	Writing a book is – people don't just sort of stumble into it.
	I mean I must have written before On Truth.
	I probably wrote – I did have a professional editor and I had a writing teacher.
	I had several writing teachers.
	I went to theater school.
	I studied writing.
	I wrote creatively in university and got feedback.
	I wrote plays and got audience feedback.
	I had done a ton of writing with some significant audience and professional and editor review before I started writing for Free Domain Radio.
	People – like writing a book is a big professional task and lots of people have ideas and lots of people write good and entertaining emails and articles and so on.
	Writing a book is just – I mean you just don't wander into it.
	Don't think it's just something you can sort of pick up and do.
	It's hard and it takes a lot of practice.
	It takes a lot of training.
	Like I don't sit there and say, well, I think – I've always enjoyed listening to music so I think I'm going to go write a piano concerto and play it.
	Yeah.
	Well, no.
	I mean, there's a respect for composing, that it takes a lot of training and practice, and there's respect for playing piano.
	It takes a lot of training and practice, particularly to the point where you want people to pay for your piano playing or your composing.
	And so, you know, my touchstone of creativity, the band Queen, I spent years practicing really before they started doing any live gigs.
	And they spent 10 years floundering around.
	They had an album or two before they started to really hit it big.
	The Beatles, of course, as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, did 10,000 hours of live playing before they even started to have any of their big hits because they did, what, a year or two in Germany where they were playing like six, seven, eight hours a day.
	Don't assume that you can just sit down and just start writing a book and somehow it's going to come off.
	It's a complex and challenging work that involves a good deal of skill.
	It involves a good deal of professional feedback.
	You can do it, of course, but I think have respect for the amount of feedback and research and audience understanding that you're going to need to put in place before you just start sitting down to write.
	Does that make any sense?
	Definitely.
	Good.
	Well, look at that.
	Knocked one out of the park within the first few minutes.
	So, Mike, if we can move on to the next poll, I would really appreciate that.
	Good luck.
	Good luck with your book.
	All right, Anthony, you're up next.
	Hey, Steph, how are you?
	I am very well.
	Oh, a friend of mine who works in a grocery store, saving his pennies for some day.
	Yeah, good time to be talking about piano and Queen's early stuff.
	I was just arranging Making an arrangement of My Fairy King from the first album.
	Do you know it?
	Oh, do I know it?
	The fairy folk now gathered around the moonshine.
	Is that the one?
	Oh, no, that's...
	Is that the one?
	Anyway, but yeah, it's great composition, and the amount of work they put in that early stuff is fantastic.
	Yeah, the man had a full set.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, he actually composed that song by looking at a tapestry.
	I don't remember the name of it, but you can Google it.
	He composed that song, and actually everything that's in the song describes something that's on a medieval tapestry.
	Anyway, I just want to point that out.
	Anyway, so what's on your mind?
	Well, first of all, I want to congratulate you in coming to the end of your chemo, and I hope that we can all see that behind you for the rest of time.
	Thanks.
	Yeah, I finished chemo and I finished the radiation treatment as well.
	So I am pleased.
	And yeah, my voice has started to come back slowly, which is nice, getting a bit of the old flexibility back and all that.
	Because when you talk for a living, and I noticed this in seeing the comedians, Joe Rogan and a couple of other guys, that whether you're a singer or not, if you're on stage or you're any kind of public communicator, your voice is kind of like an instrument.
	Joe Rogan has a great voice, very flexible, very able to take on characters and personas.
	And I'm sure he's worked on developing that and all.
	But I sure have missed the flexibility of the voice for what it is that I do.
	So I'm glad to be getting it back.
	But thank you very much.
	I appreciate that.
	Okay, great.
	So I moved to Edinburgh to finish my postgraduate studies in counselling.
	And part of the reason why I'm doing it is obviously to learn some new skills and get qualifications, so I've got the option of working as a counsellor if I want to.
	But the main reason is to sort of give me a bit more credibility in what I've been doing on the side of teaching piano over the last couple of years and in the self-help field and I've been expanding that.
	So now that I've moved and I've got settled down, I'm looking to launch my business more formally and I was wondering if you could maybe advise me On what you think are the top tips and best ways to advertise and things like that.
	Now, do you mean you're starting your business in teaching piano?
	No, I've been doing that for several years, but over the last few years I've been moving into self-help, and most of what I've been doing is teaching the stuff that I found really helped me the most, so good communication skills, and I've also done a bit of inner child work, as you have to call it, because you don't want to get busted for calling yourself a counsellor or a therapist when you've not got...
	You're a life coach.
	Kind of.
	Life coaches mostly just ask people questions.
	I do that a lot.
	A lot of listening, a lot of reflecting back what I hear and when people are ready for approaches, I speak to them more about whatever I have to offer them.
	Mostly, you know, stuff like how to assert yourself well, how to listen empathetically, you know, how to say no, how to resolve conflicts, how to resolve them before they start, and things like that.
	They're the things that I felt learning really, you know, instantly improved my life, just like that.
	So I think they're the most important thing.
	Because, you know, I was bumbling about for about seven years trying to figure out how to be happy before I started stumbling across stuff that really helped me.
	So I'm just trying to give people that shortcut.
	I've got some really good testimonials, but I did a lot of pro bono work, especially for friends and friends and friends at the beginning.
	Which was great, you know, good practice.
	And then I ran some workshops and things, but it's hard to get the word out to the right audience.
	I mean, I've not tried putting in a advertisement in a paper or anything yet, but that might be an idea.
	Yeah, I mean, as far as advertising goes, I've not found it to be particularly helpful.
	I've tried a variety of advertising strategies early on, and what I have found to be the case, and I don't know if this is the case for everyone, but for me, is to give out as much as possible in the hopes of converting it to an income.
	And that's not any kind of genius insight from my standpoint, because, I mean, that is a...
	That is a fairly common thing.
	It's a fairly common reality.
	But if you write articles and you write books and all that kind of stuff and give it out for free, then there will be some interest.
	Now, of course, the tough part is how do you get people to read whatever it is that you put, whatever it is you create.
	And what you do, of course, is you find websites with large traffic in the area and you ask if you can be a columnist, right?
	You ask if you can provide a resource for them, right?
	So if you're a men's rights guy, then you go to a Voice for Men or other things like that.
	If you find that you have – if there are experts in the field that you really like, you offer to interview them and then you publish the interviews and likely they'll publish the interviews so people will get a chance to see What you do from their standpoint and all that.
	So I would argue that it's really important to just try your very best to get your work into the kind of audience of people whose work you like.
	And from there, I think you'll gain credibility.
	And you don't gain credibility by just interviewing somebody intelligent or famous or well-read or an author or something.
	You get the credibility by Actually engaging with them with sort of intelligent back and forth and that kind of stuff.
	And so that would be my suggestion at least sort of as how to start.
	And that way you get your work and your name in front of people.
	And then if they are interested in what you have to offer, then I think you are that much further ahead.
	Does that help at all?
	Well, I love the idea of trying to be a columnist because I was thinking of Doing some of what you've said, like maybe putting up a YouTube channel with sharp self-help videos and maybe writing a blog.
	Well, the idea of seeing if there's somewhere where I can submit the work sounds like a good idea.
	I am working on a couple of books at the moment as well, so...
	Yeah, I mean, my start was...
	Sorry to interrupt, but my start was...
	I mean, I had a blog and stuff like that, but I mean, who cared, right?
	I mean, everyone and their dog had a blog.
	But once I started submitting to Lou Rockwell and Strike the Root and other places, then I started to get some more traction.
	And so, yeah, just do a search for whatever you're interested in and find the top sites.
	You know, read their stuff, figure out their style, try and write something similar or something that's going to be of use to them, and then submit and just try and get all that kind of stuff going.
	Okay, great.
	Well, if anyone out there in FDR land would like to check it out, I did do consultations on Skype.
	The website's just gone up.
	It's www.enrichyourlife.co.
	.co?
	.co.
	That's all.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	And we appreciate that.
	Of course, in the video, we will be providing Trainspotting-style subtitles for The Brogue, just so people can follow.
	I can follow, but I've had some exposure to it before.
	But best of luck.
	And of course, yeah, please check out the website.
	The other thing too, of course, is you can email people who've done what you want to do and ask them for 20 minutes of their time.
	Pick their brains.
	You can offer to pay them for their time.
	Pick their brains.
	How did you get to where you are?
	How did you figure it out?
	And what steps did you take that were valuable?
	What steps did you take that weren't valuable?
	You don't want to reinvent the wheel if at all humanly possible.
	So I would strongly suggest that kind of stuff.
	Just a lot of people who are self-starters, they think they want to do it alone.
	A lot of people who are entrepreneurially inclined don't really want to ask people for help.
	And I think really the difference between success and failure in so many areas is getting the right information and not having to thrash around and invent.
	If you want to Lose weight.
	You don't just, I think, randomly start changing your diet and see what happens.
	You know, there's a lot of science and a lot of work has gone into diets already.
	And so, you know, if you want to learn how to bulk yourself up, you don't just start grabbing things and lifting them, right?
	I mean, you get a personal trainer.
	You figure out.
	You read books.
	You know, it's the stuff that's been done before.
	And entrepreneurs generally like to think that they can, you know, build the car from scratch with themselves by digging for iron under their house.
	And I think go ask for help.
	You know, leverage the knowledge base that other people have already hard-won themselves and leverage other people's success for mutual gain by being on popular websites and all that.
	And I think that's the best way I would suggest.
	I'm not inimical to that at all.
	I mean, I want to go around and do all the courses in the world.
	I've already spent hundreds of hours reading and researching and practicing what I teach anyway, so I've really internalized it, which is great because you can answer questions, whereas if you've just read it in a book, Then you can only pirate what you've learned.
	If you've lived it, then you know how to teach it.
	And I feel the same way as you do when you were talking about Yeah, I remember you were once, compared to Aristotle, and you said, well, you know, I don't want to go out and be kind of mediocre at what I do.
	I'd like to be up there amongst the best, and I feel the same way.
	I don't want to just be, you know, an average communication and relationship coach.
	I'd like to be one of the best people going, so I'm not going to ask me for help.
	Yeah, I mean, nobody says I want to get married to someone I kind of like.
	I mean, I guess people do, but you want to get married to the love of your life.
	And I would suggest that.
	The other thing, of course, you can do is with the permission of the people you may do coaching with, you might ask them, if it stays anonymous, if you can...
	If you can record sessions and publish them, and that way people can see the style of coaching and the style of engagement and how you work, and that's a demonstration, right?
	Testimonials are great, but people really can't verify how you work.
	I mean, you could have made up these testimonials.
	It could be your dog.
	I'm not saying you have, but it could be, right?
	And so I would suggest if you can get permission from people you want to work with, then record.
	You can always put their voice through an anonymizer or something like that so that he sounds like you're counseling Daleks or something.
	But give people a taste of how you work.
	I think that's really important.
	Okay, great.
	I'll get on that.
	Thanks very much for your advice.
	Sorry, or even if it's a transcript.
	You can edit the transcript and so on, and then you could read the transcript with a friend.
	That way it's not the person's voice, it's not identifiable even.
	That's a really good idea.
	All right.
	Well, listen, best of luck and enrichyourlife.co.
	Don't put the M on.
	Don't.
	You'll want to.
	Don't let that autofill.
	Don't push that iOS button.
	So, yeah, enrichyourlife.co.
	I hope that it works out and all the best.
	Thank you very much.
	Speak again soon.
	You're welcome.
	All right, Josh, you're up next.
	Go ahead.
	Is this Josh Groban calling in to complain about me saying he has no young listeners?
	Sing it to me, brother.
	Actually, that's a really nice version.
	He doesn't really...
	You might want to check it.
	It's a really nice version of Don McLean's Starry Starry Night about Vincent van...
	No, no, it's not Van Gogh.
	I went out with a Dutch lady once who informed me it was van...
	I think there's an umlaut.
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	Sorry.
	Let me return to the caller since I'm saying focus on your listener.
	So, what's up, my friend?
	First off, let me say, this is my first time calling in, so let me say how much I appreciate what you're doing.
	I think it was really great work.
	And as far as I know, I haven't seen anyone else doing it, so I'm glad that you're there.
	Yeah, they do have a fair amount of common sense, so that does limit my competitors to people who are insane like I am, but I appreciate that.
	Well, I was calling in today.
	I wanted to talk generally about something that happened with me almost a year and a half ago now.
	When did you start listening to the show?
	It's been a while.
	This is 2013, so probably three or four years ago.
	And why did it take you so long?
	I've been a lurker on the forums for a long time.
	A lot of this I've kind of used advice from your forums and from your shows that I've been listening to and videos to try to come to my own conclusions on some things, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, look, I'm not criticizing.
	I'm just curious, right?
	So if you want to start talking about something important that happened to you a year and a half ago and you've listened to the show for three years, my first question is why wait a year and a half?
	And it's not a criticism.
	I mean it could be fantastically great reasons.
	It's just I'd like to know what they are.
	Well, to be completely honest, I mean it did occur to me and I just kind of – I put it off and said I'll do it next week and then I put it off again.
	You know what I mean?
	Wait, wait, wait.
	You mean you held on to next week for a year and a half?
	Does this have anything to do with procrastination as a topic as a whole?
	I'm just kidding.
	It does, yes.
	I'm notorious for being bad at procrastinating.
	I did post on the forums about it and I got some replies.
	But since I posted it on the forums, the whole story is there.
	So that was actually going to be my expression to you.
	Since the story is up on the forum board, do you want me to tell you the story or would you rather read it?
	Can you give me a link in Skype or tell me what to look for?
	I can.
	I have it open right here.
	Yeah, go for it.
	Part of the reason I haven't called in over the last year is because some other things have come up personally.
	That have kind of distracted me from this.
	So it's – and it mostly started at the beginning of this year, but I'm sure we'll get into that later.
	So that's not shorthand now, I think.
	All right.
	So, dear Steph, I was born a female poodle.
	I have since had a sex change and become a bisexual parakeet.
	Oh, sorry.
	Sorry.
	I got the wrong link.
	Mike, will you stop posting stuff on the message board?
	It's confusing for people.
	Yeah, that's Mike.
	Sorry, that's a little confusing.
	Okay.
	And now you know what happens is I make some ridiculous joke and it's going to be something completely serious.
	I just want everyone to know that I stepped into this landmine completely willingly to make a joke about bisexual budget regards because we all have our demographic that we're trying to reach.
	I know I'm trying to reach them.
	Anyway.
	Okay.
	Hey, guys.
	I suspect I know where this conversation will go.
	Right.
	Right.
	The listener.
	But I have a couple of questions that I appreciate some level-headed opinions on.
	If I can't get any level-headed opinions, I'm going to go talk to staff as a last resort.
	I had a very emotionally trying weekend.
	I flew to Oahu.
	Is that right?
	Oahu.
	Yes.
	Oahu.
	Okay.
	To visit my girlfriend last weekend.
	Yeah.
	And spent the week visiting both her and her family.
	I visited a beach with the whole family, had her first date.
	You had your first date with your girlfriend you went to visit?
	Yeah, go ahead and finish reading.
	I'll tell you.
	All right.
	Helps around the house doing more housework than I do even at home.
	After a week, though, we made a mistake.
	After about a week of being together, we've been talking openly for months, things became physical.
	Normally, this wouldn't have been an issue.
	Normally, that's actually quite a positive thing for most people.
	But she lives at home with parents at the moment, and their main rule was specifically against anything of that nature happening at home.
	This isn't because they have any moral objections to us being together, but because there are young children in the house who are not ready to be around that kind of thing.
	So we made the mistake of breaking that rule and we're obviously in the wrong.
	My problem, however, began when her parents began their form of punishment.
	Rather than any form of physical punishment or reasonable lecture about how what we did was wrong, they started by screaming at the top of their lungs as if in an effort to intentionally wake up all the kids in the house.
	Ah.
	I suspect a rather unsubtle UPB violation occurring.
	Don't traumatize the children!
	Right, okay.
	It was only then that I realized the degree to which her parents can be emotionally abusive to control her and her brothers and sisters.
	Some of the emotional shots that they took, I wouldn't even take against someone that I really disliked or even hated.
	Her mother took every low blow she could think of calling me a bum, comparing me to her last boyfriend and especially low blow because he had once been a friend.
	A friend of yours, I assume, right?
	And even calling their own daughter names.
	Their level of cruelty when they felt wronged astounded me.
	After trying to remain quiet and respectful while they yelled, UPP violation number two, I was asked explicitly to agree with something that her mother said, whether I actually agreed with it or not.
	At that point, I was tired of being screamed at and made a meager attempt to stand up for the decision my girlfriend had made, to leave the house and talk about the situation.
	I guess when people had calmed down, right?
	Both parents acted abashed that I hadn't remained passive and agreed with their conclusion that she should shut up and do as she was told and started yelling again.
	Then her mother began forcing her back to her room and instead of defending herself or her right to remove herself from the situation, she is 20 years old, she walked meekly back to her room.
	I was offended and felt abandoned and turned around and left the house while her father stood by yelling, That's right!
	You better leave!
	I then managed to hitchhike to the airport and called my parents to purchase a ticket home.
	While sitting at the airport, I spoke to her And she told me that I overreacted for calling my parents, and that she had the situation under control, and that I should have had more faith in her ability to manage her parents.
	She then continued to defend the things her mom had said, and basically left me with a choice of whether or not to work it out, but established that her family would always come first.
	At the time, I was offended and went so far as to break up with her on the spot.
	However, since then, we have spoken again, and are trying to work things out.
	For a little context, this is a girl that I care very deeply for.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I was just going to say, this is a long time ago.
	This is not accurate anymore, but I'll explain it.
	Well, no, if it's not accurate, I don't want to read stuff that doesn't...
	Go ahead.
	It's still an accurate history.
	It's just not, you know, the most recent history, if that makes sense.
	Yeah.
	So is there more stuff?
	Well, since then, we're not speaking anymore.
	I mean, we stopped talking shortly after that, within like a month.
	Kind of fell apart.
	So, this is kind of where I'm coming from, in a very sense.
	My question to you is, first, I want your opinion on this.
	Kind of, generally speaking, if I made the decision, the right decision, you know, leaving what I did.
	And also, kind of where to go from here, because it's been over a year, so I feel more comfortable now, after some time has passed.
	But, I also wanted to get your opinion on What a good way it would be to avoid, I don't know, what's the good way to put it?
	To avoid meeting someone with the same issue and then also kind of what approach to take to weed out that mentality, if that makes sense, in someone that I'm interested in.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, what's your history?
	I'm sorry, are you still there?
	Yeah, sorry.
	What is your history with discipline?
	How were you disciplined as a child?
	Physical punishment, mostly.
	Most of my parents were religious.
	Actually, there's a cultural history there, but...
	I was spanked as a child.
	It wasn't excessive, but any is too much.
	It wasn't like an everyday thing, but that's definitely there.
	And how often were you smacked?
	I mean, roughly.
	That's really tough to say.
	Was it once a year, once a month, once a week?
	It was never once a week.
	It was never more often than once every two weeks or maybe once a month.
	And it wasn't really regular.
	It was kind of one of those things you could never see coming.
	So maybe 25 times a year for what, 10 years?
	From like 3 to 13 or 2 to 12?
	I'd say it was probably just I don't know, maybe 4 or 5 to like 12 or so, probably.
	Okay, so maybe 200 times.
	Yeah, I guess.
	Right.
	Yeah, so maybe 150 or 200 times you got hit, right?
	Sure.
	Well, I'm not trying to tell you, I'm asking.
	I mean, the only reason I'm saying sure is because...
	You know, I mean, you're taking an estimate and you're compiling an average and saying that...
	Are you asking me if it's that amount of times?
	I mean, I don't know that I can put a number on it, you know what I mean?
	But...
	Well, no.
	No, you can, right?
	Because if you say it every...
	No, hang on.
	Hang on.
	I'm not making anything up here.
	I'm just trying to compile what you tell me, right?
	So if you say it was once every two weeks, then that's, you know, 25 times a year.
	And, you know, if that's five years, then it's 125 times, right?
	Right, but I'm not accurate in saying it's just once every two weeks, so that's my point.
	It was never a scheduled thing.
	It was only...
	No, I understand.
	It's not like, oh, every second Sunday at 10 a.m., whether you need it or not, we wake you up for a spanking.
	No, of course.
	We're just talking about averages.
	I understand that, and there's no way to come to an exact number.
	But the reason that's important is it wasn't a thousand times and it wasn't once.
	It's somewhere around 100, 125, 150, maybe 90, something like that, right?
	Yeah.
	That's probably – those are big numbers, but you have a point.
	I'm going to let you get to it.
	Well, I'm not trying to have a point.
	Again, I'm trying to find some sense of accuracy.
	Go ahead.
	What did you say?
	I'm just trying to find some sense of accuracy.
	I'm not trying to make a point.
	I'm just trying to get a rough approximation because, I mean, some people call and they say, I was spanked, and I say, well, what happened?
	They say, well, my mom did it once, and she apologized, and she never did it again, and whatever, whatever, right?
	And then other people say, well, I was spanked and it turns out that they were beaten with belts like twice a week.
	So it's important for me to get some sense of how often because those two things are not the same.
	I mean, neither of them are particularly great, but being hit by a belt a couple of times a week is different from your mom spanking you once and then apologizing for it, right?
	Right, right.
	Now, how did the spanking occur?
	Was it with the hand?
	Was it on bare buttocks?
	Was it with an implement?
	How did it occur?
	It started out with the hand.
	Eventually, when it got too painful for my parents, with the hand, it turned into...
	I'll never forget, when I was a kid, my dad actually...
	I had acted up at my grandmother's house once, and he actually was called at work and had to leave work and come back.
	So what he did was...
	He brought me to the house and he left the basement door open so that I could hear the wood being cut downstairs while he formed the paddle.
	And so then that was what he used from there.
	Wow.
	Now, when you say you acted up at your grandparents' place, what does that mean?
	Did you set fire to it?
	Did you string up a cap?
	Oh, no.
	No, I don't even remember now.
	I think I might have been Messing with my little sister or something, you know?
	So this was a really calculated kind of sadism.
	At least that's how I would characterize it.
	Like, you wait here, I'm going to go down, you'll hear the blade as I put together the paddle or make the paddle that I'm going to beat you with, right?
	Yeah, that's kind of how it went.
	I'm sorry?
	I said, yeah, that's kind of how it went.
	Sorry.
	I'm very sorry.
	I mean, that's – I'm incredibly sorry for that.
	You know, when there is a more extreme form of violence, my argument would be that that was always present in the household as a possibility.
	In other words, you probably always knew that your father could do that, right?
	Or that that was something that could happen.
	Now, was that beating on bare skin or was it through clothes?
	You're breaking up.
	I heard what you said, but you broke up there towards the end.
	Can you hear me?
	Yeah.
	Was it on bare skin, that beating?
	It was through clothes.
	It was through clothes, and was it as painful as I can imagine, or was it more shocking?
	Yeah, it was pretty shocking.
	Right.
	And did your mother know about this?
	Uh...
	I don't know if she did at the time, but she found out.
	And what was the response?
	I don't remember.
	It's been so long, I don't remember.
	She always sided with him, you know, you shouldn't have done whatever.
	So she felt it was a good thing?
	Or something that you brought upon yourself and your dad did the right thing?
	Right, right.
	Something you brought upon yourself, something that's not ideal but necessary.
	Well, it's not ideal, but I mean, the not ideal was your behavior, not how your father handled it, right?
	Is my understanding correct?
	So your father did the right thing based upon the circumstances.
	Yeah, I think so.
	I mean, that point could be argued, but I don't know her mindset well enough to really say for sure.
	And did the beating leave Marx?
	Oh, no.
	Okay.
	All right.
	All right.
	Not physically.
	No, no, I get it.
	Psychologically, of course, right?
	I'm very sorry for that.
	It's, I mean, it's wretched.
	And how old were you at that time?
	I don't even know, to be honest.
	I'd be guessing if I told you.
	Well, roughly.
	Somewhere between five and ten.
	Somewhere between 5 and 10.
	Wow, that's a pretty wide range.
	And did you...
	Did you end up...
	How do I put this?
	Was there stuff after that?
	I mean, that occurred with that.
	I assume that was the worst, right?
	Yeah, I mean...
	Aside from the fact that that was always what you used...
	Yeah, it was all after.
	That was the worst of it, for sure.
	Right.
	And after I got to beat 12 or 13, Mark was playing back and stopped.
	Right, okay.
	Do you consider that discipline, or do you consider that a beating or assault?
	I'm sorry, can you say that one more time?
	Did you consider that discipline or would you consider that discipline or would you consider that beating or assault?
	No, I don't consider that to be a valid problem of discipline, no.
	Right, okay.
	And what about, did your mother spank you too?
	I don't think so, actually.
	I think it was almost dead.
	And how did your mother then enforce her will on you?
	I don't know.
	That's a tough question.
	Maybe emotional arguments is the main, you know, the traditional guilt trip.
	That's kind of most of where it came from, I think.
	Right.
	And I see now, too, like, Where I'm living, I'm living here with my mother still and her mother is living right down the street and when I spend time with the book, I can see that it comes out in book, sometimes they have the emotional manipulation or they're trying to get you to do what they want to do.
	Right.
	And did your mother raise her voice?
	Sometimes, yeah, on occasion.
	To the degree with which your girlfriends did or not that much?
	Probably not that much.
	The thing that struck me about my girlfriend's mother and about how she jumped at that so quickly was the main thing because she went from Completely level-headed and calling herself rational to just screaming at the top of the lungs, you know what I mean?
	The mom you mean?
	No, I mean, yeah, her mother, yeah.
	Yeah.
	So the mother, she said, I'm rational, or she was very level-headed?
	No, rational, yeah.
	Not irrational.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Okay.
	All right.
	And how would you...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	How would you currently characterize your relationship with your parents?
	Well, recently, my dad actually just walked out.
	Just left, you mean?
	I assume you don't mean off the room while you were talking.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right, right.
	My mother, he just says he went to file for divorce and moved back to where his family lives in a different state.
	And why does he want to file for divorce?
	The reason he gave birth, he was unhappy.
	Right.
	Now, were you ever punished as a child for lying or for breaking a promise?
	Lying, yes, for sure.
	So I guess what you need to do then is sit down with your dad and ask him exactly how, what size a paddle you should make for him in the basement for breaking the vow to stay with your mother until death do you part.
	Because he's broken a much more significant vow.
	He's broken a much more significant promise than you ever possibly could have done as a child.
	So I think it's important to ask him what his punishment should be and how – where he would like to be hit with a big piece of wood.
	This is what pisses me off about parents who hit and who yell, who spank, is that they end up often doing shit as adults that is far more egregious than anything their is that they end up often doing shit as adults that is far more egregious than I mean, you acted up a little bit at your grandparents, whatever that even means, and you get hit.
	And now he just walked out on his wife, on the family.
	He's moving out of state.
	I mean, don't you have a say in this?
	Doesn't he ask if you would like him to stick around?
	Don't you get a say in whether you get to have a dad around at all anymore?
	You know, he asked – he sat down with me and my sister multiple times and asked us about that.
	And we both kind of told him that he had to do what was best for him.
	So you're okay with him leaving the state?
	I mean, I'm just wondering, I feel like he, as an individual, he has to do what's right for him, but at the same time, Wait, wait, wait.
	Is that what he taught you as a child?
	That you as a child have to do what's right for you?
	No, no, it's not.
	Okay, no, no, hang on, hang on.
	What did he teach you as a child?
	Do what you're told.
	Yeah, do what's right for the family.
	Do what's respectful to your elders.
	I don't think he taught you.
	Do what's best for you at the expense of others.
	I assume your mom doesn't want him to leave.
	I'm sorry, did you ask me a question?
	Does your mom want him to leave?
	No.
	No, she definitely didn't when he left.
	Does he know that most people who want to get divorced, who stay together after five years, are actually very happy and are very glad that they did not get divorced?
	If they do the work, right?
	If they go to therapy, if they go to counseling, if they work it out, right?
	Does he know?
	Has he done the research?
	Does he know the facts about divorce in its aftermath?
	He's not one to jump to research, that's for sure.
	I'm sure he doesn't know that.
	Or if he does, he doesn't care.
	So would this be characterized as a sort of selfish act in that?
	I mean, look, whether he should stay or not, I don't know.
	I mean, what the hell?
	I don't even know your family at all.
	I don't know whether he should stay or not.
	It is for sure a selfish decision, but I don't know.
	I'm kind of cautious to try to judge other people's decisions as being selfish.
	But I guess...
	Why?
	I have to do it.
	I don't necessarily...
	Because I don't know how I feel in their situation being judged, you know what I mean?
	Because...
	I'm sorry, I don't understand what that means.
	This might be entirely something that I've been conditioned to think, or it might be just some irrational preference of mine, but...
	Look, let me put it this way.
	You would like it, I would assume that you would like it, and tell me if I'm wrong, I don't know.
	Would you like it if your parents went to therapy, worked things out, and stayed together, and were happy?
	Yeah, I mean, that would probably be preferable to them splitting.
	Have you told them that?
	No, I don't guess so.
	Don't be an enabler.
	Don't be an enabler and the breakup of a family, if it is at all avoidable.
	Be honest.
	I think the reason I haven't mentioned it to him is because I don't want to be that person trying to...
	Remember I mentioned that my mom likes to do the emotional guilt trip, but I don't want to be the one trying to guilt somebody into doing something that they don't want to do.
	You know what I mean?
	Wait, wait, wait.
	How is you being honest being manipulative?
	You see, you're being manipulative at the moment.
	Because anytime you're not honest with someone, you're being manipulative.
	That's the very definition of manipulation.
	It's withholding information, it's providing false information for the sake of some effect.
	Now, I don't know why You're not telling him, A, Dad, you told me to stick by my commitments and punish me otherwise.
	B, you chose this woman.
	C, a lot of people who stay together and work it out or end up really happy.
	D, I would rank you guys to go to therapy and work it out.
	Look, I think everybody who, even if you're getting divorced and you're going to for sure get divorced, you all need to go to therapy.
	The mom and dad need to go to therapy because that way you can have as amicable a divorce as possible.
	I think just walking away is catastrophic.
	It's just – and so to be responsible, you're an adult now, right?
	So you're a man.
	So he's not some deities.
	He's not some Old Testament Zeus-style long beard deity up there when you're just some tiny little mouse, right?
	I mean, be a man.
	And I hate to say that because, I mean, it sounds like women.
	If you're a woman, I'd say, well, be a woman.
	Be an adult.
	And step up and say, this is not how this family should end.
	This is not how this family should end, with somebody just walking away.
	And it should not end with you guys saying, well, Dad, you've got to do what's best for you.
	That's nothing.
	That doesn't mean anything.
	How do you know that leaving is best for him?
	You don't know that.
	I don't.
	Me saying that was me trying to give him the space to make the decision for himself, not trying to encourage him to do one thing or the other.
	I'm not sure that's how it was taken, but...
	Trying to give him the space to make the decision for himself?
	Right.
	What does that even mean?
	I mean, you don't owe him space.
	Listen, you don't owe him space to make the decision for himself.
	You are all part of a family.
	If you and me are in a lifeboat and you just suddenly decide to start smashing holes at the bottom, I don't move to the other end of the lifeboat and say, well, I'm giving you space to make the decision for what's best for you.
	That's a beautiful analogy.
	You owe him honesty in a relationship.
	Because if there's not honesty, there's no relationship.
	You understand?
	The only degree to which there is a relationship is the degree to which you are honest.
	I mean, if he was sitting there saying, you know...
	I never got around to trying heroin in my youth.
	So I think I'm going to go and try and score some horse and, you know, head up to the Horsehead Nebula.
	And you wouldn't say, well, you know, you got to do what's best for you, right?
	I'm giving you space to make the decision, right?
	And I'm not saying that getting divorced is good or bad.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	But it is such a huge decision, right?
	I mean, it's not like your need for a dad Just vanishes because you're 20, right?
	And, you know, if you get married and you have grandkids and he's not around in the same state, that's going to be a huge problem.
	You know, a significant amount of science has gone into researching the effects of grandparents on children, and they're very positive in many ways.
	You don't get that.
	It's going to be awkward when you get married, if you get married, right?
	I mean, who's going to come and who's going to sit where?
	I mean, it's It's awkward.
	It's complicated.
	It's confusing.
	It's expensive.
	Now to see him, you've got to fly, or he's got to fly.
	The easy Sunday dinners, the drop-bys, I mean, it's all gone, right?
	Now, maybe you want him to go.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	But what I do know is that you owe him.
	If you want to have a relationship with him, don't have...
	A self-consciously pat yourself on the back, I'm giving him space, not be honest, kind of pseudo thing, right?
	No.
	Have a direct connection.
	And tell him what you think and what you feel.
	Because if...
	There's this weird thing where...
	We feel somehow that if we give our honest opinion, we're controlling others.
	You know, if I tell you, listen, I don't want you to move to Hawaii, that we're somehow banning people from moving to Hawaii.
	Right?
	It's not true.
	If you're my good friend and you're moving to Hawaii and I say, I really don't want you to move to Hawaii.
	I mean, I don't know if people interpret that like, oh my god.
	I can't move to Hawaii now, or he's trying to make me not move to Hawaii.
	No, he's just being honest.
	I'm just being honest, telling you, I don't want you to move to Hawaii.
	I'll miss you.
	I don't want you to move to Hawaii.
	It doesn't mean you can't.
	It doesn't even mean you shouldn't.
	I'm just telling you, I don't want, I'm being honest.
	I don't want you to move to Hawaii.
	If your mom doesn't really want your dad to leave, what is she doing about it?
	God, this passivity drives me nuts.
	Is she throwing herself on the ground?
	Is she sobbing?
	Is she promising therapy?
	She did.
	She did for a long time.
	Okay, good.
	Then help her out.
	Right.
	Be honest.
	Be honest.
	And find out what the hell's going on.
	Because you're saying do what's best for you, but you don't know what's going on.
	You're unhappy.
	Well...
	I don't know.
	Me and my sister have tried to stay out of the divorce because, I mean, you know...
	Because why?
	You think you're in a different lifeboat?
	I don't know.
	We're trying to put ourselves in a different lifeboat.
	I don't know.
	Well, maybe, but right now you're not in a different lifeboat.
	This is a family event, right?
	You're all in the same lifeboat.
	And your dad's taking a hammer to the bottom.
	And he's like, okay, I'm going to take a plane to a different lifeboat, but you guys are going to end up with a broken family, right?
	And then what if someone gets remarried and, oh my god.
	I've heard a call.
	No, it's horrible.
	And what if your mom gets acrimonious or your dad gets acrimonious and you get law courts and lawyers involved and, oh my god, listen.
	They're actually in the process of that now.
	This divorce was initiated at the beginning of this year, so this is, I mean, it's already begun to drag on and Well, listen, I can guarantee you then that I don't care how rich your parents are, a significant portion of the family wealth is going to go into the pockets of lawyers.
	I'm not saying keep them together because you can inherit more, but this is going to significantly fuck with your inheritance, right?
	And again, I'm not saying that that means, oh, they've got to stay together so you get more money, but what I'm saying is that you are involved.
	So stepping back like you're not, I don't know.
	Be honest.
	You know, if you want them to work it out, if you don't want them to go to lawyers, if you don't want them to go blow $100,000 on legal bills, tell them.
	You expressing your clear desires does not make you a dictator.
	Right?
	In fact, you're kind of a dictator by withholding the honest truth from them, right?
	Like...
	I mean if I was in some dating relationship and I said, oh, that girl is really cute and then my girlfriend said, well, you know, you can go kiss her if you want.
	You know, it's your choice.
	It's up to you, right?
	And then I went and go kiss her and then she broke up with me.
	I'd be like, well, damn, that was a stupid trap that I fell into, right?
	Don't give me some non-honest answer and then I go and do something and then there's some huge problem.
	I mean, what if this has a huge, significant, negative impact on your relationship with your father?
	What if you end up alienated or not talking or whatever, right?
	I'm not saying that you say, well, if you go to do this, I'm never going to talk.
	I'm not saying that.
	But, I mean, he needs to know your honest thoughts and feelings about what's occurring.
	Don't have a whiplash, backlash later.
	And you telling him what you think and feel and what you want and don't want is just called being honest.
	It doesn't control him at all.
	But you're trying to control him by withholding information, by not getting involved, by not being honest with him.
	You know, withholding information is a form of manipulation and it is dishonest and it is destructive to a relationship.
	You have strong thoughts and opinions about this.
	Of course you do.
	Because these are your parents.
	You know, the family is getting smashed up, and it might be acrimonious.
	It's going to be horrendously expensive, and it might go on for years, right?
	And as soon as they start dragging lawyers into it in any significant way, how do the lawyers make their money?
	We all know that, right?
	By provoking conflict.
	And most likely, that's what those lawyers are going to do.
	So, yeah, I think it's time for a family sit-down where everybody puts their cards on the table and stop being so nice and supportive because that's not true.
	That's not honest.
	Now, I will compliment your ex-girlfriend's honesty.
	Ha ha ha.
	Right?
	She was not honest when she said, I've got it under control, right?
	I mean, yeah.
	Appeasing people who are abusive, yeah, you can often get them to calm down.
	Sure.
	Absolutely.
	I think Neville Chamberlain tried that in the 1930s with Hitler, and look what happened, right?
	But at least she was honest when she said, my family will always come first.
	I choose abusers.
	Right?
	Screaming and calling names, this is just abusive.
	It was just outright abusive.
	Hitting you with a paddle was abusive, too.
	If your parents had done that in Canada, they would be criminals.
	You cannot hit with implements now in some U.S. Sorry, go ahead.
	I see the similarity, and I get that we're both from abusive backgrounds, and I guess the difference is that I've just tried to distance myself from it, where she just embraced it.
	I don't understand how...
	Let me tell you why I did all of this, right?
	So you can understand why the hell I was talking about all of this when it was supposed to be about your girlfriend, right?
	If I was a woman and I was talking to you about all of this stuff and I was me, if I was me and I was asking you all of these questions, I would not date you.
	I'm showing you how to ask questions to find out whether somebody is a worthwhile romantic companion or somebody who's going to be honest with you, somebody who has values, somebody who has standards, somebody who has self-knowledge, somebody who has integrity.
	Now, please understand, I'm not accusing you or telling you that you don't have integrity or anything.
	I'm not telling you anything like that.
	But when I ask you about how you were disciplined, you don't have any emotional connection to it.
	You're not particularly upset about it and you're resistant to actually calling it for what it is.
	Right?
	You called it discipline.
	You called it spanking.
	You didn't say, I was beaten.
	I was hit.
	You didn't – and you don't have any emotional connection to it.
	It's not considered – you don't consider it horrible or nasty and you haven't talked to your parents openly about it.
	So I know – and when I actually gave you the number count, you got all kinds of like evasive and avoidance and – Which means you've got a whole lot of stuff that you don't want to process, or rather that your parents don't want you to process.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, it does.
	And then, when it came out a little later that your parents were splitting up, you were intentionally withholding your true thoughts and feelings from your family, both about the history of what happened to you as a child and about the current divorce.
	And what that tells me, as a woman who might date you, Is that you have...
	You call not being honest with people a virtue.
	That tells me everything I need to know about how you're going to be in a romantic relationship.
	Is you're going to be manipulative and you're not even going to know that you're being manipulative because you're going to call it giving people space to make their own decisions.
	You're going to call it a virtue and you're going to call honesty with people manipulative and you're going to call dishonesty with people A virtue.
	That tells me everything that I need to know about how you're going to be in a romantic relationship.
	So what I was doing with you was asking you the kinds of questions that I will strongly urge you to ask people who you might date.
	Can I give you a little bit more ammo?
	No, no, hang on.
	Not that I'm averse to more ammo, right?
	But if you had talked to your girlfriend and you had found out that her parents regularly screamed at her, And that she thought that was fine, that she felt she was in control of the situation, and that those people who screamed at her and abused her would always come first in her life, what would you have said?
	I think that's tragic.
	I think you need therapy, and I'm not going to come within a thousand miles of you with any romantic intentions.
	Because you know exactly.
	People tell you everything that you need to know.
	Okay, hit me with more, Emma.
	Well, I was just going to say that the thing that When you say brutally honest, you're now making honesty advance.
	You see how you do that?
	The moment somebody says to me brutally honest, I know that they don't understand what honesty is.
	Honesty is not brutal.
	Have I been honest with you?
	Yeah.
	Have I been brutal?
	No.
	Or mean or destructive?
	I hope not.
	No, I mean, if I have been, let me know.
	I mean, I don't believe I have been, but, you know.
	No, I don't think you have been.
	I think I've been very honest with you, and I think I've probably been more honest with you than most people, if not everyone, in your life to date.
	But I don't think there's been any brutality in it.
	So if you want to know how to protect yourself from situations like this, all you need to do is ask people about their childhoods and note with great detail how they respond. all you need to do is ask people about their Thank you.
	And that will tell you everything that you need to know about how it's going to be going forward.
	Because the values that people have and that they express when they're talking about their childhoods are the values that they're going to follow in their relationship with you.
	Your girlfriend was screamed at and abused by her parents and the only person she criticized in that whole situation was you.
	You were overreacting, you were running off, you were, whatever, I can't remember the exact details, but the only person That she had anything negative to say about in that whole interaction was you.
	You get that's nuts, right?
	Yeah, I did.
	And her loyalties were very clear.
	And what that means, when she says she will put her family first, what she means is, I will be like my family.
	Right?
	What she means is that she also has permission to scream at people.
	It means she also has permission to call people names.
	It means that if, God help you, you would ever have a child with that woman, not only would she expose that child to these screamy grandparents or her parents, but she would also do that same thing to the child.
	She's telling you incredibly clearly, my family comes first means I'm going to be like my family, particularly when I become a mom, I'm going to be and do what my mom is and does.
	I mean, you have the right to subject yourself to that abuse if you want.
	I think you shouldn't, but you have the right to.
	But you do not have the right to have a child and bring a child into that kind of abusive environment, right?
	I mean, you have the right to smoke drugs yourself in a free society.
	That doesn't mean you have the right to inject drugs into a baby, like hallucinogens or mind-altering substances, right?
	And so I know you're 20 and you're probably not thinking all kinds of like long-term mom, parents, kids and all that kind of stuff.
	But you should.
	You should.
	You should start to think about that stuff.
	The reason being that the qualities that make for a good mother are the qualities that make for a good girlfriend.
	You can't have one without the other because empathy, curiosity, sensitivity and so on, right?
	And the reason why we also need people who are good moms in our lives is we all have our inner children, right?
	And sometimes we will act out as an inner child and we need somebody with reasonably competent parenting skills to help us just as the other person when they act out as a little child will need reasonably competent parenting skills from us.
	And so, yeah.
	You may not want to have children with everyone you date.
	But you want every woman you date to have the capacity to be a great mom because that's going to mean that she'll be a great girlfriend.
	And if she's out there defending abusers and only getting upset with people who leave an abusive situation, she stayed in an abusive situation, defended and exalted it.
	And you left and the only person that she had problems with was you who wasn't going to sit by and put up with the abuse, right?
	That tells you everything you need to know, and you could have found that out with a 10-minute conversation at the very beginning of things if you wanted.
	Yeah, that's what I actually called into that, was to get from you how that conversation would go, if that makes sense.
	See, she's not here, so I had to do it with you.
	Does that make sense?
	Right, right, right.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Thanks for a great call.
	I hope it was useful and helpful.
	And really, really, just ask people about their childhoods.
	Ask how they were disciplined.
	And if they say, well, you know, I was hit with a bag of ferrets and I deserved it.
	Well...
	Enjoy your life and your future bags of ferrets, right?
	Because they're telling you everything you need to know.
	And if they say, well, you know, I was hit a lot as a child.
	It was absolutely horrible.
	Completely unacceptable.
	You know, I've gone to therapy.
	I've read all these books.
	I've talked about it with my parents.
	We've come to some sort of resolution or whatever it is, right?
	Then there's a possibility.
	But listen to people describe how conflicts were resolved in their childhood.
	Relationships are about...
	Successful relationships are those relationships where conflicts are successfully resolved.
	And in fact, people's intimacy and connection and closeness and love are enhanced through the resolution of conflicts.
	I have always become closer to my wife and to my friends when we have conflicts and work through them successfully because the conflicts will always arise.
	And they are an opportunity for intimacy and self-knowledge and a greater connection.
	And so when you're asking someone...
	What you're doing is you're saying, how were conflicts resolved when you were a child?
	I was yelled at, I was beaten, I was starved, I was whipped, I was hit with implements and so on.
	Well, you know that that person does not know how to resolve conflicts except through dominance, except through top-down, except through bullying, except through all of the either aggressive or passive-aggressive mechanisms that arise in hierarchical and aggressive relationships.
	They just, you know, do you speak Mandarin?
	No.
	I'm never exposed to it as a kid.
	Do you know how to negotiate successfully?
	Do you know how to resolve conflicts?
	No.
	Because the only way things were resolved when I was a kid was I was yelled at.
	I was hit.
	I was beaten.
	I was sent to bed without dinner.
	I was put in timeouts.
	I just ended up having to obey.
	Well, that person is telling you they don't know how to resolve conflicts.
	And all they know how to do is to manipulate and bully and submit.
	Good luck, right?
	It's never going to work out in any kind of mature relationship.
	Now, if they have said, well, I didn't learn this stuff about how to negotiate.
	It was terrible.
	I've recognized that as a deficiency, and I've gone to therapy, and I've read books, and I've talked about things, and I've really learned how to negotiate despite the fact that I was never taught that as a child.
	Well, okay, great.
	But when you're asking people about their childhoods, you're asking about their capacity to negotiate.
	Positively and productively resolve disputes in the future.
	And if they defend being hit or yelled at or confined as children, they're simply telling you they will never be successful at productively resolving conflicts in the future, which means that you've set yourself up for a roller coaster of hurt.
	So anyway, thank you very much for your call.
	I think we are moving on to Nick.
	Yeah, Nicholas, go ahead.
	Hey, Seth.
	Hello.
	Really glad I get to talk to you before you talk to Peter Joseph about the Zeitgeist thing.
	Oh, yes.
	I'm relatively new to anarchism.
	Yeah?
	No.
	Okay.
	I'm relatively new to anarchism.
	No, no, you're not.
	No, you're not.
	No, no, no, no.
	I understand what you mean.
	I understand what you mean.
	I knew I could fix you enjoying talking to me.
	I knew I could fix you being happy to talk to me.
	No.
	When you were a kid and you played with other kids, did you pull out a gun and tell them what year they were going to play?
	No.
	No.
	What did you all do?
	You all sat down and said, well, I'm going to do this.
	Ah, that sucks.
	We did that yesterday.
	How about this?
	And you all came to something that you wanted to do, right?
	Exactly.
	Was there a central authority?
	Did you go to the government department of here's what you get to do after school?
	Are you new to anarchy?
	I am not.
	You are not at all new to anarchy.
	I am newly acceptant of it or understanding of it.
	I could say that, right?
	No, because you understood it as a kid too.
	You understood that you couldn't impose what you want to do on other kids, right?
	Again, I'm sorry to be so annoying.
	I apologize, but it's really important.
	Please don't present anarchy as something that people have anew to and have to understand.
	Exactly.
	You may be new to the conceptual identification, but don't introduce anarchy like it's some freaky ass thing that is like, whoa, okay, you've never heard of this before.
	I'm going to introduce you to something freaky and new.
	It's like, hey, you remember how it worked when you were a kid?
	Well, that worked, right?
	And you were children.
	Imagine if adults could do that as adults.
	Anyway, so I just really wanted to point that out.
	You may be new to a conceptual identification.
	Of what you already knew.
	But what you're basically coming to me is saying, I have a diet, and you're coming to me and saying, hey, Steph, I'm new to eating.
	No, no.
	You're not new to eating.
	You may be new to an awareness of what to eat or how to eat, but you're not new to eating.
	So you're not new to anarchy, but you may be new to a sort of conceptual identification of what we're all so intimately familiar with, right?
	That is exactly what I meant.
	Okay, and sorry to keep going, but it's important.
	Go ahead.
	No problem.
	In 2007, I graduated high school and the zeitgeist was actually what woke me up to the Federal Reserve and the fact that left versus right is still the same thing.
	Statism.
	Soon after that, I discovered Ron Paul, became a libertarian.
	Soon after that, Adam Kokesh introduced me to a volunteer.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Why did you move on from the zeitgeist movement?
	Well, it basically showed me that Politics.
	I was a liberal, so it basically showed me that being a liberal or a Republican is complete bullshit.
	The actual problem is just coercion, I suppose.
	I suppose.
	Is that what they say?
	Is that what they say, that the problem is coercion?
	Because I thought they thought the problem was like money or materialism or something like that.
	That is actually what I'm going to get.
	I was originally going to call about anarcho-syndicism because apparently there's different kinds of anarchy and that makes no sense to me.
	Yeah, I don't know how there's different ways of not stealing.
	Exactly.
	I've got nine different ways of not assaulting you today.
	Okay, go on.
	So you were asking how Zeitgeist made me see that.
	It was just the money aspect, how money shouldn't be controlled.
	It should be free for people to use on their own terms, I guess.
	Right.
	Well, that's certainly fine.
	I've got some notes here.
	I'm trying to figure out where to pick out on them.
	I'm sorry if I've completely screwed up your call, you know, with my...
	Yes, but it's good.
	I got rid of some of the...
	No, whatever you want to chat about.
	I mean, if you've got an original topic you want to pursue, don't let me derail you.
	you.
	I mean, that's totally fine.
	How about the anarcho-syndicates...
	I argued against them that they are actually anarcho-capitalists.
	They want to...
	Take a business, form it to where they all have equal ownership of their product, the sales, take equal responsibility, and then go out there and sell it.
	But they seem to think that the moment anarchy happens, some cat with a monocle, cigar, and top hat is going to force them into this wage, slave, labor concept.
	But there's actually nothing stopping them from finding like-minded people, putting a business together, and selling a product.
	Yeah, I mean, the degree to which people are afraid of giant monopoly pieces or something like that is kind of alarming.
	Yeah, there's nothing wrong.
	They can form a company that all of the employees have equal ownership.
	That's perfectly valid.
	Nothing wrong with that at all.
	I mean, that's possible now, if you want.
	Yep.
	Okay, so going back to the Zeitgeist thing.
	You...
	Adam Koch, Libertarianism, The Venus Project, to me, the way I see it is it's all possible, but you cannot have The Venus Project without technology.
	You cannot have the technology without the free market for the incentive to make it, which is anarcho-capitalism.
	And I guess would have to transfer from what we have now to a minarchism state and then going into anarcho-capitalism.
	But I see it as this long line of Eventually, when there's no need for labor anymore because anarcho-capitalism cannot exist without labor, would you agree with that?
	Anarcho-capitalism cannot exist without labor.
	I'm not sure.
	And as long as labor is needed to serve...
	Okay, so labor.
	Well, no, sorry.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	It depends what you mean by labor.
	Right, so...
	The need to physically work to sustain life.
	Well, I mean...
	I have to load the dishwasher, but it's a lot easier than doing dishes, right?
	So that's a labor-saving device.
	Now, I guess you could get a robot that would load the dishwasher for me, right?
	And certainly, I think people would rather not do manual labor than do manual labor.
	And we know that because there's all these labor-saving devices out there that people want.
	People would rather drive than walk.
	People would rather a machine clean their dishes or their laundry.
	I mean, you don't see a lot of people who could afford it going out to beat their clothes.
	You know, with soap and a rock down by the river, right?
	So I think that people want to not do boring, stupid shit, right?
	That's why there are maids, right?
	Who wants to clean their own toilets if you don't have to, right?
	Or the Roomba, right?
	Goes around vacuums, right?
	He's a little robot.
	So, I mean, I could certainly...
	It seems to me pretty clear that as technology improves and increases, that there would be less and less...
	Of a need for physical labor and maybe we could get giant farming robots or maybe we could get robots that would completely clean our house and maybe the cars would all drive themselves and maybe the cars would make themselves.
	I don't know.
	I mean they're a labor saving device.
	I don't think that there's any practical limit to the degree of labor that can be saved through technology.
	So I don't think that labor is necessary for anarcho-capitalism to exist or to run.
	I mean, the degree to which we can save labor, I mean, why not keep pushing that till it's almost all gone?
	Yes, and then that is precisely where something like the Venus Project would come into handy.
	Because if Okay, so money is labor.
	It's an equal trade of labor for money so that you can use that money as a neutral part of your purchase.
	No, no, no.
	Money is not labor.
	Necessarily.
	Money is value.
	But it represents labor.
	No, money is – no, it doesn't.
	I mean, because you can have – I mean, you can have value without labor, right?
	So I might be on a phone call with someone and I give them such a great idea just during our chat that they give me 5% of their company.
	Have I labored?
	Well, not really.
	I just gave them a great idea, right?
	Yeah, they're buying your idea, but I agree.
	But it's not really labor.
	Like, I'm not going to work for them.
	They may have thought the idea wasn't that great and not giving me any money.
	So it could happen that you just end up with a piece of a company because you had a great idea.
	That's not really labor.
	And of course, someone who inherits money has not worked for it, right?
	I mean, you could say, well, their parents worked for it or somebody worked for it or whatever, right?
	But, of course, a lot of money that exists right now is not the result of labor, productive labor, but it's the result of theft, right?
	So, I mean, a guy who goes and buys a gun… Moving around debt and stuff on a computer.
	Yeah, or a thief, a thief who comes and steals your money.
	He's invested labor into getting your money, but we wouldn't say it's legitimate to him.
	And politicians put in a lot of work to get elected, but it's not like – I mean they're basically just ornamental thieves, right?
	Yeah.
	So money to me is stored value, but I wouldn't necessarily – because I think that sounds dangerously close to the Marxist idea of the labor theory of value, right?
	That the only value is labor, and that's not true.
	The value in a factory, the labor is really not that important.
	The value, you know, it's like saying about a woman that you love, the most important thing about you is your liver.
	And you say, well, what do you mean?
	They say, well, without your liver, you'd be dead.
	So the most important – and I don't want you to be dead.
	So the most important thing about you is your liver.
	Well, now, it's true that without the liver, she'd be dead, right?
	But it doesn't mean that the liver is then the most important part of her.
	The most important part of her, I would assume, is her tits.
	No.
	The most important part about her would be her integrity, her virtue, her whatever, right?
	I mean the stuff that you would love about her courage and all that honesty.
	And so in the same way, the value – Is not guys moving around building stuff.
	I mean, people have been doing that since caveman days.
	That's how they built the pyramids.
	But they weren't a rich society.
	The real value is the concepts, the ideas, the planning, the market research, the allocation of resources in the most efficient possible way.
	And if you have a bunch of guys – I mean people worked pretty hard in the Soviet Union, but they were broke as hell, starved to death half the time.
	It was – when they got rid of farm machinery – well, they couldn't use farm machinery because they couldn't get the parts.
	Then people had to go and collect all the food by hand.
	But that was a huge amount of labor, and they all starved to death, right?
	Or half of them did, right?
	Ten million died in the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s.
	Same thing happened in – In China in the 1940s, I think there was like another 10 million or 20 million.
	Same thing happened in Cambodia.
	Hundreds of thousands of people starved.
	So there was more labor being invested in the production of agriculture, but there was much less food being produced.
	So it was the lack of machinery, the lack of capital investment.
	That's what really provides the value.
	Farmers work a lot less hard now than they did in the 8th century.
	But they produce like literally 20 to 30 times more food.
	So it's – the value is the lack of labor or the – yeah, the lack of labor.
	And so you – I mean a lot of what is produced in the modern world, you simply can't produce without machinery.
	I mean I don't think – a guy – the lathe, right?
	You shape the cylinder of steel or whatever.
	You can't even do that without machinery.
	You can't have furnace.
	You can't have steel without – any significant amounts of steel without a furnace, right?
	And so – I mean you can't just go down with your hands and scoop out oil from the ground and put it in your car.
	Trust me.
	When I was in Texas, I thought that's what you did.
	It wasn't good at all.
	But it was a rental, so it was all right.
	But it's – So it's all the machinery.
	It's all the focus.
	It's all the concepts.
	It's all the investment.
	It's all the abstraction.
	It's all the capital stuff.
	Capital is stuff that you don't sell to the consumer, but you use to make stuff to sell to the consumer.
	That's the stuff that creates real value, not the labor.
	Anyway, I just want to point that out.
	I would not say that money is labor.
	Money is value, and the value is primarily conceptual.
	All right.
	Well, that helps because, like I said, I'm new to this whole thing, so I'm trying to learn all the stuff.
	Yeah.
	But the real original reason why I called was taking the non-aggression principle and the focus of self-defense all the way to the end where you can apply it to the state and status.
	Just completely hypothetical here.
	If a drunk man walks into the street and a car swerves out of his way to, say, crash into another car, the drunk man is responsible for that wreck because without his action being there, the flow of traffic would have continued normally, correct?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So...
	People – let's say a wife is looking to hire a hitman to kill her husband and collect insurance money.
	She is part of the reason why the hitman would kill her husband, so she is also a part of the – Oh, no.
	She's not part of the reason.
	She is the reason.
	She is?
	Okay.
	Yeah, because without her paying him, the murder would not occur.
	That doesn't mean the hitman is innocent.
	It just means that she shares equally in the murder.
	Alright, so these people are enablers or actual criminals themselves.
	Let's imagine that if...
	Now you're going to try and equate this to government employees, right?
	No.
	No, sorry, my mistake.
	Go ahead.
	Yes.
	Let's imagine that there's this body of force out there willing to commit crimes just so that the people involved can make more money.
	And when people vote in specific ways, yeah.
	Let's theorize in a really, really abstract way.
	All right, okay.
	Wait, wait.
	Actually, I do have experience with this.
	Go ahead.
	I think I've just created it for you.
	Okay, go ahead.
	These people are voting to initiate force onto people who don't want it.
	So if you have a status voting for...
	No, no, no.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	No, that's not what they're doing.
	I mean, because there's two ways to describe...
	I want you to disagree with me on this.
	No, there's two ways to describe what it is that they're doing.
	One is the actual facts of the matter, and the other is what they genuinely believe that they're doing.
	Okay.
	Right, because...
	So you're saying like malice versus...
	Listen, let's say that this man who wanders into traffic, let's say that he's not a drunk.
	Let's say he was given a medication that he was told would have no side effects, right?
	But then it turned out, for whatever reason, it did have side effects on him, made him dizzy, disoriented, maybe he was allergic in some manner, and it was unprecedented, never happened before.
	Would he still be responsible?
	No, not to the point of criminality.
	Yeah, because when you take a drink, you know it's going to have an effect on you, right?
	It's going to make you disoriented, dizzy, exhibitionistic, or whatever, right?
	Yeah, I actually just got done with your most recent book.
	Right, but if you take a medicine which says don't operate heavy machinery, you go operate heavy machinery, you're responsible.
	But if you take an aspirin, and then it turns out to have some weird reaction that makes you feel like you've had 12 drinks...
	Then you're not responsible because you didn't know.
	And no one told you and there was no way to know.
	Really.
	Right?
	Is somebody who was raised in Stalinist Russia in the 1950s responsible for being a communist?
	I'm sorry, did you ask me a question?
	I did.
	Did somebody who was raised in Stalinist Russia in the 1950s, is that person morally responsible for being a communist?
	Because they had no other information given to them.
	Exactly.
	Is somebody who was born in 1934 and was put into the Hitler Youth and all that, is he responsible for having Nazi tendencies as a child or as a young man?
	No, but if that person grew up with those ideas in their head and then decided to force their ideas onto someone else at the point of a gun, say, in war or something, would we be able to act in self-defense then?
	Well, no, because he was told – no, no, no, no.
	Listen, the Nazis had a great story as to why they needed to defend themselves.
	I mean I don't want to go into all of it right now.
	I've done it and you can look at it in the myths of world wars and other stuff that I've done.
	But the Nazis had a very compelling story.
	I'm not saying it was true, but it was compelling.
	The Nazis had a very compelling story as to why they needed to wage war.
	And so this is all he would have been told, right?
	This is all he would have imbibed.
	This is all he would have been taught.
	And the same thing, of course, is true of status, right?
	They don't believe that they're initiating the use of force.
	If somebody – like I think some California county just banned, I think, using animal skins in clothes or something like that, right?
	Now, the people who are in pursuit of that, they genuinely believe that using the power of the state in this instance is doing a moral good.
	People who vote for the welfare state.
	You talk about getting rid of the welfare state and people are like, oh my god.
	People will starve.
	People will die.
	Children will die.
	Right?
	You talk about privatizing healthcare.
	People – like sick people will die.
	And so they genuinely believe that they're in hot pursuit of the moral good when they are voting, when they are participating, and they consider it a virtue.
	Right?
	You don't vote when – What kind of bad citizen are you?
	Exercising your democratic right that soldiers have died around the world to give you and all that, right?
	I mean, so they are in the matrix, right?
	That's their physics.
	Exactly.
	How about we place the blame or self-defense onto the matrix itself, like the media who knowingly, well, maybe they knowingly misinformed these people.
	To go vote status ways, which enables...
	Are you saying the media knows too?
	Are you saying the media is in on anarchism but is covering up the status?
	The media is in cahoots.
	No.
	Well, of course the media is in cahoots, absolutely.
	But they have an audience of statists that they have to talk to.
	So the government schools are continually pumping out these statists chanting bloodthirsty zombies, right?
	Just as a continually churning these out.
	Right?
	I mean if the government keeps making zombies, can you really blame people for getting into the brain business?
	Right?
	Here, buffet of brains.
	Brains on a stick.
	Brains you can dip in chocolate.
	A bowl of brains.
	Brains on bread.
	Brains on toast, right?
	Because the zombies are there and they all want brains and so there's a lot of companies who get into the business of delivering brains, right?
	To me, and do you blame the zombies in charge for wanting to produce more?
	You understand, if you want to start getting into the blame, I think that you will not find a place to fix it, except in one place.
	The media cannot present anarchism to the general population because the general population will recoil and they will stop watching that media.
	Then that media will go out of business because the whole point of media is to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, right?
	And if they can't do that, they go out of business.
	It's like I'm opening up a restaurant in Zombie Town that serves lovely tofu.
	Well, they come and say, do you have brains?
	No, we've got lovely tofu.
	Ugh.
	Is tofu made of brains?
	No.
	Unless you're an academic.
	But, right next door is a lovely brain buffet, you know, with squishy brain salad and, you know, deep fried brains.
	Well, we'll go there because tofu, we don't like tofu.
	Right?
	So, I mean, then the restaurant, the tofu goes out of business, right?
	And if the media presents voluntarism to the general public, they will go out of business.
	You understand?
	Yes.
	Is it their fault that they don't want to put themselves out of business for no point to advocate something they consider immoral?
	Can you imagine, you know, what is it?
	Ferret news, all anarchy, all the time.
	A fair and balanced view of anarchy, right?
	I mean, all they think is that people in balaclavas tune in to find out where the best garbage cans are to throw through a Starbucks window, right?
	That's all they'll see, right?
	So is the media in cahoots?
	Well, I guess, but they're still pandering to the zombies produced by the government system.
	Who want brains, not tofu?
	There's only one place that blame can be apportioned.
	It's you.
	The government?
	Or the idea of government?
	No, it's just you.
	In fact, I've really, you know, unfortunately, and we've been waiting for this lottery, you have to now be the scapegoat.
	I really apologize for that.
	It's just bad luck, bad timing.
	Oh, man, if you'd been the next caller, you'd be clear.
	But now we found a scapegoat.
	No, the government can't be blamed either.
	I don't think.
	I mean, yes, they lie, and yeah, okay, fine.
	But...
	But I would not imagine that people in the government would have any kind of clear idea of anarchy to me either.
	No.
	I mean not to play too coy.
	The only place where blame can be affixed is in the people who have been presented with the clear and rational arguments for freedom.
	Those people have now a moral responsibility to either rebut the arguments or accept them.
	Well, no.
	You can either rebut the arguments or you have to accept them or you call yourself an irrational asshole.
	That's the only choices.
	I say to you taxation is theft, then you have to prove to me how it's not.
	You have to accept that it is theft and change your mind about it or you have to accept that you're just an irrational asshole who rejects the truth.
	Now, a lot of people don't want to go with column C. I mean, who wants to wake up in the morning and say, well, yes, slavery is evil, but I sure like cotton, and I don't know.
	I just fuck it, right?
	They're slaves.
	Too bad.
	I'm an irrational asshole who rejects reason.
	I don't want to do that, right?
	And they sure as hell don't want to accept the taxation of slavery.
	Sorry, the taxation of theft.
	Well, same def.
	Because then they have a moral responsibility.
	And now...
	They can do something good or they can do something evil.
	They can pursue virtue or they can encourage vice.
	They don't want that.
	Why do you think society is so fucking committed to talking about trivia and sports and weather and bullshit?
	Because bullshit doesn't give you moral responsibility.
	Because trivia does not expand your moral horizons.
	People are addicted to talking about nothing because they don't want moral responsibility.
	This is why everybody preens and cloaks themselves in the fine feathers of moral shit that nobody disagrees with.
	Ooh, I want to help the poor.
	Whoa, what a moral hero.
	That's never been thought of before.
	I'm against racism.
	Ooh, wow, you're just incredible.
	You're like the freedom fighters.
	I think slavery is bad.
	I think that hungry people should get food.
	I want medicine for the sick.
	Oh!
	Oh my god, you're a moral innovator.
	You're like Galileo to the solar system.
	It's astounding!
	You're just an immoral, forward, progressive, heroic paragon of virtue that blinds all who come within a light year of a scintillating virtue, right?
	I mean, people just love that.
	I mean, now, of course, most of them would have been the assholes who attacked anyone who first brought up these ideas.
	But people love to say all these non-controversial things.
	I think we should defend our country.
	I think we should defend the homeland from terrorism.
	No!
	I think terrorism should flourish!
	I'm gonna be a contrarian, right?
	I'm for education.
	Yeah, I want to eat hungry people before they get too hungry to be good eating!
	Anyway, I mean, this is just a nonsense.
	Why do people talk about it?
	Why don't people want to talk about philosophy?
	Why don't people want to talk about virtue?
	Why don't people want to talk about principles?
	Because once you get principles, you get moral responsibility, and then you have to actually fucking do something about the state of the world, rather than just repeating all of the one moral battles that aren't really one, but people think they're one.
	I think women should be equal.
	Ooh!
	Whoa!
	Whoa!
	What are you saying?
	It's like you're not even speaking English to me, man.
	So, but what does that mean?
	What does it mean women should be equal?
	I mean, nobody can even tell they should be equal in the eyes of the law.
	Ah!
	Ah, okay.
	Well, what does that mean?
	Does that mean they should get the same prison sentences as men for the same crimes?
	Does that mean they should be prosecuted for, say, false rape allegations?
	Does that mean that they should pay millions of dollars to men who they've given false paternity claims against?
	Does that mean that they should never get alimony because men don't in general?
	I mean, what does that mean?
	Does that mean that a man has the right to walk away from fatherhood In the same way that a woman has the right to have an abortion and walk away from motherhood?
	I mean what does that mean?
	Nobody knows, right?
	Because the whole point is you just make empty self-congratulatory moral statements that mean nothing and affect nothing so that you can avoid actually discussing principles and then actually having to take a stand that might get you in trouble, right?
	Everybody wants the benefits of being virtuous.
	Nobody wants the challenges, right?
	I'd say most of them don't know.
	No, they don't know, and they exist in a state of nature.
	And then you bring some reason and evidence to them, and you are creating good and evil in their world.
	You are creating moral responsibility in their world.
	And most people would like to punch you in the throat rather than accept moral responsibility, right?
	Which is why the moment you start bringing up anything of any substance, what do people do?
	How about them, Jay?
	I saw a great MMA fight last night.
	Actually, for once, I can say that that's true.
	What do they say?
	Don't bring that up.
	Let's not talk about it.
	Oh, religion.
	Oh, sex.
	Oh, politics.
	Oh, philosophy.
	Let's get something else.
	Oh!
	I mean they literally will drop a watermelon on a dog so that they have something else to talk about.
	I mean they literally will like, oh, I accidentally ran into a wall.
	I need some help.
	Like people will actually fuck up any conversations of substance rather than have the possible albatross of moral responsibility hang from their neck, right?
	And so – yeah, go ahead.
	I've more recently...
	I figured out that in terms of philosophy, getting people to think that the Socratic method, as I've been trying to do more of, is actually proving to be a little bit better than just hurling facts at people, because they always want to come back with, well, no, that's not true because of this.
	Well, you come up with the answer, and I'll ask you, and you can hear how fucking ridiculous you sound.
	Yeah, three words.
	Three words is a hand grenade rolled into any relationship.
	What is virtue?
	What is virtue?
	I mean, this is the argument I put forward in Untruth, the tyranny of illusion.
	Available for free at freedominradio.com forward slash free.
	But what is virtue?
	Ask your parents.
	What is virtue?
	Remember how you punished me and rewarded me for being good and bad?
	Well, what is virtue?
	Dollars to donuts, if they ain't got UBB tucked under their arm, they're probably not going to be able to even have a bad answer to that question.
	What is justice?
	What is truth?
	How do we know something is true from something which is not true?
	Because remember, as a kid, you got punished by teachers, parents, and priests for lying, which meant that they knew what was true and what was not true.
	I mean, to punish a child, you better have a pretty damn good methodology.
	You know, if you want to give a child a medicine, you read the label five times, right?
	You've got to have FDA approval.
	It's got to be double-blind tested for a generation.
	I mean, SSRI is excluded.
	But...
	If you want to discipline a child, if you want to hit a child, confine a child, deny food to a child, yell at a child, punish a child, you better damn well know what the hell you're doing.
	Punish a child for lying.
	Wow, you must really know the difference between truth and falsehood.
	Punish a child for disrespect.
	Well, you better sure as hell know what the objective definition of respect is, and you also better damn well know what in human action should be respected, and you also better know How that child knows the difference and is morally responsible for the difference.
	I luckily had a pretty decent childhood.
	Good for you.
	That's fantastic.
	Good for your parents, in fact, rather than good for you.
	Lucky for you, good for your parents.
	Yeah.
	But the reality is that most people, when you ask them what is virtue, what is truth, they don't know.
	I mean, I would imagine your parents don't have a very strong methodology.
	Maybe they're objectivists.
	Maybe they have some methodology, right?
	Or maybe they even have a bad methodology.
	Like, well, I don't know.
	What did the pope say?
	But the reality is that not one person in 10,000 can even come up with any kind of interest, let alone any kind of remotely coherent reply to the question, what is truth, what is virtue?
	And yet all we do as society is yell and beat and punish and incarcerate and put on parole and Imprison and arrest, and we are just laying down, blood-soaked, javelin-thrown fire, flamethrower flickering, gun-to-the-neck moral judgments all the time.
	And then you say to people, well, what is morality?
	And they don't have a clue.
	Which means that, you know, I made this joke recently.
	It wasn't even a joke about going to a place in the South, and there was a braille sign that said, no guns allowed in the building.
	You know, we are blind people with machine guns with the trigger glued open, right?
	We just shoot wildly.
	We shoot randomly.
	We don't know what the hell we're doing, but it satisfies some primitive, ugly lust in us to recreate the punishments we experienced as children and normalize them and thus excuse our parents, preachers, and teachers.
	It's a really good way to look at it.
	Yeah, but it's true.
	I mean, go to the people.
	Who are vengeful against addicts on the war on drugs go to the district attorneys who threaten people with 10 years in jail.
	They get them to confess to 18 months.
	And you ask them, what is truth?
	What is virtue?
	They won't be able to answer you.
	I mean they'll point at the law and then you'll say, well, then nothing was wrong which happened in Nazi Germany because it was all legal.
	Well, that was bad law.
	Well, okay.
	Well, what is the objective difference between good and bad law?
	They hate hearing that.
	Of course, because they want to dominate and let their primitive reptile brains literally cannibalize the lives of others for the sake of their own petty, empty desire for taking the shape of evil because otherwise they have no shape at all.
	And yet this is what it is in society.
	Nobody wants to ask those questions.
	What is virtue?
	What is truth?
	Because It is then revealed to them that they don't know, but punished everyone anyway.
	Punished girlfriends, punished children, punished students, punished friends, and supported the punishment of billions of people around the world.
	When they had no idea.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	I recently sparked a pretty big argument amongst family members on Facebook.
	I asked, how do we know murder is wrong?
	And first response, because God tells us so.
	Right.
	A couple others, like, oh, my empathy tells me that.
	Well, you know, these are all feelings.
	Your God says no.
	Someone else's God on the inside of the world says yes.
	Just because he says yes, does that automatically mean that if he wants to murder you, you are now, you know, immoral for saying no.
	You have to base your beliefs on a truth, something that's, you know, like you said, universal.
	Yeah, but the point of moral instruction from a religious standpoint has nothing to do with murder being wrong at all.
	The point of religious instruction is to create a template which excuses the rulers from the moral rules they violently inflict upon their subjects.
	And the template is very clear.
	I mean, as you're aware, I'm sure, in the Old Testament, God fucking kills everyone.
	Yeah.
	I mean, literally...
	In fact, he says don't kill, and then like in the next book...
	Yeah.
	He kills everyone.
	He kills babies.
	He kills fetuses in the womb.
	He kills disabled people.
	He kills retarded people.
	He kills everyone except for Noah and some unicorns and some...
	No koala bears.
	They don't go to Australia to pick them up, right?
	So God kills everyone and then says that virtue means not killing, which obviously means that God is as evil an entity as can be conceived of.
	Right?
	God...
	I mean, you couldn't get a more open confession.
	Murder is evil.
	Oh, listen, Your Honor, who's underwater, I just killed everyone.
	And murder is evil.
	What's that saying?
	I am the most evil.
	That's not even complicated.
	I mean, that's not like Raskolnikov torturing himself through crime and punishment, revisiting the scene of the crime and hanging out with prostitutes and pedophiles.
	That is murder is evil.
	I just murdered almost the entire human race.
	Almost the entire human race.
	I mean, Hitler couldn't dream of it.
	Couldn't even imagine that kind of Immorality.
	Couldn't even remotely achieve it.
	I mean, he killed, he caused the death or started a war which resulted in the death of like 40 million out of, I don't know how many people were alive then, a billion maybe.
	Yeah.
	Tiny, tiny, tiny percentage.
	Right?
	And what, 0.4%?
	I don't know, something like that.
	I mean, God killed almost everyone and says murder is evil.
	Oh, look at that.
	Was it self-defense?
	No.
	Can't kill God.
	Can't even harm Him.
	Can't find Him.
	I remember you can't find Him, right?
	But the point of the story is nothing to do with God.
	The point of the story is to create a template where those in authority are never subject to the laws they inflict upon their citizens.
	They do the opposite and you still have to call them virtuous.
	Of course.
	Of course.
	What you and I do Is defined in so many instances by the government as evil.
	Oh, you counterfeited your own currency.
	Sorry, that means a lengthy jail term.
	Oh, you stole.
	You initiated force to pay for it.
	Doesn't matter what.
	Your kid's education, some charitable law.
	It doesn't matter.
	You stole.
	That's immoral.
	Oh, are you saying you went to another country and shot some people?
	Oh, that's...
	We get Interpol on that.
	We're going to get you delivered.
	No.
	We'll get extradition and we're going to throw you in jail.
	Oh, did you want information from someone and you waterboarded them or flew them off to Turkey to get – right?
	Well, that's evil.
	And we're like, oh, well, that is bad or counterfeiting, right?
	And the whole point of religion is to set up a template where those in authority get to hurl terrifying, violent moral commandments at everyone else and do the exact opposite and are called virtuous.
	That's the whole point of religion.
	Is to excuse the secular evil of the rulers.
	And not only to excuse it, but to praise it.
	And to create the exact opposite for the subjects.
	Good is evil.
	Evil is good.
	And to have us never notice the difference.
	Speaking of virtue.
	I know we're probably running a little late here.
	Just one thing I've been kind of mulling over in my...
	Conversations with these other kinds of anarchists.
	This one sentence here.
	Greed only exists in an attempt to insulate oneself from scarcity.
	Would you agree with that?
	Greed only exists in an attempt to insulate oneself from scarcity.
	I mean, it sounds like a bit of a tautology.
	Greed is the gathering of excess, and the need to gather excess must be provoked by a fear of deficiency.
	But, I mean, greed can be used in so many different ways.
	And greed is just one of these negative words.
	And so I'm always a little bit...
	And if you're a malevolent person.
	Yeah, but, I mean, you don't always gather in excess because you're afraid of scarcity.
	Sometimes you gather in excess because you want to produce excess.
	Right?
	So if you save your money...
	Then you're greedy for your savings.
	You have now saved in excess.
	Is that because you're afraid of deficiency?
	No, it's because you want to start your own business.
	Or you want to invest in some whatever, right?
	You would start your business to insulate yourself from having to labor.
	You know, labor that you don't want to do.
	Are you kidding me?
	To prepare yourself from flipping burgers.
	How about that one?
	Do you think that starting a business is somehow insulating yourself from labor?
	Oh, I hope you become an entrepreneur one day.
	I just, you know, that's my Old Testament voodoo curse.
	No, I'm kidding.
	No, you don't.
	I mean, look, I had a great income and a great career before I started doing this show.
	Having these conversations on a full-time basis.
	And what am I, you know, I took a 75% pay cut.
	More, in fact, than when I first started.
	With 75% pay cut, what was I greedy for?
	Yeah, well, that's big.
	Yeah.
	Am I greedy for time with my daughter and time with my wife?
	Am I greedy for these conversations?
	Man, we just started a Wednesday show, 8 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time.
	Because there were more people that wanted to chat and more conversations that I want to have.
	I love these conversations.
	Am I greedy for them?
	Am I doing this because I'm afraid of a deficiency of conversations?
	I mean I just – I don't really know what it means.
	And so the word greed would have to be really, really careful.
	It came out of I Brought Up the Venus Project to one of those guys and they're – we were already talking about, oh, everyone is going to be greedy and – People are going to want to make all this stuff with their 3D printers and use up all these resources.
	Well, if everyone has everything they need, if everyone has all the stuff they need to live without needing labor and have to worry about all this other stuff, well, greed, to the extent that we see it today, really won't be a problem.
	Well, but there's a way to test that theory, right?
	Which is that people on welfare who live in government housing have enough to live on.
	Right?
	They have free healthcare.
	They have incredibly subsidized or free rent.
	They have food stamps.
	They have free education for their children in the form of public schools, and therefore they should not express any greed, right?
	Yeah,
	but but – theory we have We don't have to be abstract about it.
	According to the theory, people who live in a welfare state where things are provided to them should not manifest greed.
	Without the constant media saying, oh, you need to buy this or do this, because those people who work for that system, they don't live in the welfare state.
	They actually need to make money to survive.
	So they look for people who have excess money to do that.
	But let's assume that they themselves had everything they needed and they were brought up… No, no, no.
	Wait.
	No, no, no.
	But now the definition is changing.
	You're moving the goalpost.
	So the first argument, I was saying it's your argument, but the first argument is, mental note, do not release this until after tomorrow.
	But the first argument is, if people have enough, they won't want more.
	Right?
	And then I point out an example where people have more than almost everyone throughout history has, and they still want more.
	And they still express greed, right?
	And then you say, well, but the greed is then provoked by external – No, no, no, no, no, no.
	That's not – the argument was if people have enough, they don't want more.
	And then I point out why people have enough and they still want more.
	So that argument is proven false, right?
	Okay.
	So the argument needs to change in order to...
	Now, if you change the argument, but don't...
	If you're going to change the argument, explicitly change the argument, right?
	Don't just move...
	I'm not saying you, but don't just move the goalpost and pretend that you're continuing the argument, right?
	So if the theory is if people have enough, they won't want more, then...
	I point out where this is clearly not true, then you say, okay, well, that argument is disproven.
	Right?
	There should be no drug dealing in welfare neighborhoods if that theory is true.
	Right?
	Because drug dealing is the greed for more, right?
	Greed for more money, more power, more success, whatever it is, right?
	More money, more weed.
	Also, if people have enough, they shouldn't want more means that we should have no multimillionaires, right?
	Correct.
	Because, I mean, a million bucks is more than enough for people to live on if they're reasonably frugal, right?
	And that doesn't mean living like bad.
	It still means better than living like almost ever better than living anybody else in their history, right?
	So then you say, well, if people have enough, they won't want more.
	Well, lots of people have enough and still want more.
	But why the hell is Steven Spielberg still making movies?
	The guy is worth millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars, right?
	Why the hell is Brad Pitt making a movie?
	The guy has more than enough for ten generations, right?
	So, I mean, just every – now, then what they say is that, well, a different kind of human being would want more, right?
	Well, that's different, right, than saying human beings, when they have enough, don't want more.
	That's clearly false.
	And it doesn't really take more than a moment's thought to realize that, right?
	Now then, the goalpost can be moved, but I won't allow it to be moved.
	Because what we have to do is say, that argument is false.
	And must be discarded as not only false but completely obviously false.
	False without looking anything up.
	False without learning another language.
	False without statistical analysis.
	False just by thinking for two seconds about the world.
	So that's an obviously false argument.
	Which means that people are not being self-critical who propose it.
	First thing when you propose an argument, first thing you need to do is say, well, how could this be false?
	How could this be falsified?
	What are the problems with this argument?
	And if people put forward and maintain obviously false arguments, it means that they do not have the principle of self-criticism, which means everything they say is suspect.
	Does that make sense?
	It doesn't mean everything they say is false.
	Yes, your arguments are better than other stuff I've heard.
	Yeah, it doesn't mean that everything they say is false.
	It just means I don't really care to listen to more.
	Because they don't have the principle of self-criticism.
	They say stuff that kind of seems true or feels true and then they just go with it.
	Sorry, that's not responsible.
	I mean when you're talking about how human society ought to be organized or how people should live or how people should get resources, you are literally talking about life and death.
	Because people who get things wrong about how resources should be allocated in society get hundreds of millions of people killed or starved, right?
	I mean, I'm not saying they're communists, but people who were wrong about communism got hundreds of millions of people killed in the 20th century.
	They are worse than Hitler in terms of the body count, right?
	And so if people are dealing with the life and death of hundreds of millions of people and do not have the rigor of self-criticism, the rigor of let's look for the opposing viewpoints, let's invite opposing viewpoints in as much as possible, as strongly as possible, let's really put this theory to the test because by God, hundreds of millions of lives hang in the balance.
	Well, I view those people as extremely dangerous.
	As, like, more dangerous than a pathogen that could wipe out significant portions of humankind because that's what they're messing with.
	And so if people are – and it's the same thing with global warming.
	Global warming, if true, and if the government implements solutions, it will result in the deaths of millions of people to ban energy, to ban energy production, to ban energy transmission, to reduce energy consumption.
	Will result in the death of millions of people.
	There's no doubt about that.
	And so you really, really have to be very sure of global warming in order to...
	And you have to be very sure that the government is going to solve these problems, right?
	And so when you're dealing with the lives of millions of people and you're careless, And you're premature and you are not skeptical and you label skeptics as deniers with the Holocaust references and the denial of reality, basically labeling them insane.
	That is pathological.
	That is deeply evil because you are promoting things which are – I mean they just ran a study on I think 85 global warming estimates for over the past 20 years or so.
	And all but three of them were far higher than what the actual temperatures were.
	That is a catastrophic failure of the model.
	That is a catastrophic...
	Can you try that in the business world?
	Try that in the business world.
	Saying, here are sales projections.
	Here's what we should invest in.
	Here's what we should spend.
	Here's what we should build.
	And see what happens when your sales don't rise at all.
	There's been no global warming for 16 years.
	16 years.
	Not anticipated, not part of any of the models.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Every time, like, let's go back to the media.
	Every time I go on CNN's website and I post something like this, I come back a day later with 20 responses, click on it, comment's been deleted.
	On CNN money.
	On CNN money, every time I'd post this one thing on economic recovery, I would get flagged for moderation approval.
	And I narrowed it down to the one word that was triggering it, was Keynesian.
	Yeah.
	They don't want someone who has the knowledge speaking there.
	They want people just bickering left and right.
	Oh yeah, now you see this, you conservative retards, you libtards, you know, it's just...
	Yeah, they want it to be like a football game, right?
	I cheer for my team, you cheer for your team.
	Yeah, that's exactly it.
	Right.
	Yeah, of course they don't want facts.
	I mean, no, of course not, right?
	Facts are not friends of delusion.
	Obviously, they're mortal enemies, right?
	So, if people say...
	That when people have enough, they won't want more.
	As their way of solving the basic problem of having no money, of having no currency, of having things on demand, they're going against the foundations of all economic theories.
	The entire system of economics is based on the fact that human desires are infinite and resources are limited.
	That's the basic essence of economics.
	All human desires are infinite and all resources are finite.
	If that wasn't the case, you wouldn't even need economics.
	Now, what people can say is that the entire foundation of economics is complete nonsense.
	The entire foundation of economics is completely false.
	Well, that is a very big statement to make.
	And maybe they're right.
	I don't think so.
	But you can't just...
	And what about saying economics is something that needs to be changed?
	Well, no, but the foundation of economics is that human desires are infinite.
	You never have a computer that's fast enough.
	You can never get there quickly enough or cheaply enough.
	Right?
	Your food can always taste better.
	Sorry?
	Yeah.
	The computer thing about that...
	I kind of agree with it, but mostly I don't in the sense that it would be good to be there to have a reference as in, like, hey, this is how much you have left.
	You should probably pay attention to this.
	But, of course, I... I'm not advocating forcing people into this at all.
	In fact, like you always say, we don't know how the future is going to be, but...
	No, hang on.
	We're going off on a tangent here.
	Let me just finish my point.
	So people can say that the entire foundation of the discipline called economics is the opposite of the truth.
	But unless you actually tackle it, unless you actually take on that task of proving...
	That the entire foundation and purpose of economics is false, then you are fundamentally a creationist who says evolution is bullshit.
	Don't show me the evidence.
	I'm not going to make any arguments against it.
	Evolution is – and in fact, you don't even mention evolution.
	Because I don't think that these people say, well, the foundation of economics is that all human desires are infinite and blah, blah, blah, but we found a way around that, or we rebut it in this way.
	They just completely ignore it.
	I guess they hope maybe people don't know anything about economics.
	But you can't just take an entire system of thought that is pretty well established at this point and has a fair amount of credibility, I think particularly the Austrian school.
	You can't just take an entire human discipline And pretend it doesn't exist.
	That's not intellectually responsible.
	Now, I can say I think that the foundation of religion is false.
	But I will write books about it.
	I will have debates about it.
	I will make podcasts about it.
	I will work hard to establish that as something I can prove.
	Why?
	Because I'm not irresponsible in some very dangerous areas.
	I recognize that if religion falls and we don't have a system of ethics to take its place, some bad things could happen.
	That's the Nietzschean argument, right?
	That with the fall of religion comes the rise of the Superman, of the dangerous charismatic leader, right?
	Which is why I dismantle existing systems of religion and propose one that works.
	Because I try to be responsible about what I put forward.
	And people who make absurd claims that are counter to a moment's thought and ignore entire, well-established systems of human thought are dangerous and irresponsible and can literally get millions of people killed if they get their way.
	I think that's psychotic.
	What's the saying that, what is it, a liberal good intentions pave the road to hell?
	Well, I don't even give them the good intentions thing.
	Why would I even assume that they have good intentions?
	I mean they either believe that what they're doing is actually very important and can save or damn the world, in which case they have every piece of responsibility in the world, in the universe, to get it right.
	Or they don't believe it has any particular importance and won't change anything, in which case why are they proposing it as a solution to the world'sills?
	If I say I can solve the world'sills… Oh, I better damn well be working as hard as I humanly can to make sure I'm not taking people off a cliff, right?
	Yeah.
	And if you're not working insanely hard to make sure you're not taking people off a cliff but you're proposing grandiose world solutions about the allocation of resources which is the sustenance of human life and you don't know what you're doing or you haven't been self-critical or you haven't examined the evidence or you haven't done all this – you're incredibly dangerous.
	And I don't view people knowingly selling snake oil Non-solutions to critical illnesses or poisonous solutions to critical illnesses to children, while they have good intentions, they really want to cure those kids, they just have never tested their medicines.
	Well, the fact that they haven't tested their medicines, the fact that they haven't examined contrary viewpoints, the fact that they keep moving the goalposts means to me that they have no interest in curing the children.
	They only have an interest in selling the medicine and that is evil.
	Very well.
	And what happens then, of course, is they say, well, with a different kind of human being, we would have a different kind of society.
	Right?
	And look, I'm open to that criticism too.
	I would say that's the foundation of the whole concept that they're trying to push.
	Of course.
	But that's the foundation of Marxism as a whole, right?
	If we have a different kind of human being, then by God, we will have a different kind of society.
	And that's okay.
	Sure.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And, you know, if human beings were snails, we wouldn't need houses, but so fucking what?
	Right?
	I mean, if we were fish, we wouldn't need scuba gear.
	But we're not.
	Now, people say to me, well, Steph, but you say that in the future, we'll have much lower rates of criminality and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Yes, I make that claim.
	We cannot have a free society with the people we have right now.
	Yeah.
	But I don't just make that claim.
	I approve it.
	I bring the science in.
	I bring the experts in.
	I bring the data in.
	And I make that case that when we can reduce or eliminate child abuse, we can reduce or eliminate evil.
	I don't just make that case.
	I don't just pretend that the entire field of psychology and neurology and so on and child development and the science of evil, I don't pretend that that just doesn't exist and just say, well, somehow magically we're not going to have greed.
	No, I trace specific human dysfunctional behaviors back to their neurological and biological and psychological origins in childhood and bring the experts on board and bring the data on board to make that case.
	I don't just say, well, once we don't have advertising, we'll have paradise.
	What the hell does that mean?
	Yeah.
	A lot of it is definitely in theory.
	I think what they're just trying to do is, you know, as technology increases, jobs are going to disappear.
	So eventually, we're going to have to address that somehow.
	No, no, no.
	Good Lord.
	Oh, God.
	It's just not true.
	We have one more caller, right?
	So I'm going to just make this real brief.
	Are we done?
	Okay.
	Yeah, so let me just end up with this.
	The idea that jobs disappear when technology increases is just ridiculous.
	Do you want to go back to picking your food by hand?
	No, of course not.
	Is the fact that there are combine harvesters and grain processors and trucks mean that you can't have a job?
	No, but the whole thing they're doing is robotics, but yeah.
	I mean, eventually someone's going to have to go out there and fix it.
	A car is a robot, for God's sakes.
	I mean, it may not be a robot that you can program, or I guess now they are, right?
	But a car is a machine that reduces labor.
	You don't have to walk.
	A bicycle is a robot of you.
	I mean, a bicycle is a machine that reduces labor.
	You don't have to walk.
	The idea that labor eliminates jobs is ridiculous.
	Because if we wanted to have everyone have a job tomorrow, we just eliminate farm machinery.
	I mean, the funny thing is...
	Let's just take me.
	Let's say I said that technology eliminates jobs.
	And let's say that I had, say, a job on the internet to talk about this.
	Let's say that I, say, used technology to create a documentary or a movement or something like that.
	And that was my job.
	And I got some form of income or some sort of capacity to have a job or to have some sort of money out of that, right?
	Well...
	How could I then say that technology eliminates jobs when the only reason I can say that is technology has given me the job of being able to say that technology eliminates jobs?
	I mean, if I said technology eliminates jobs when my job only exists because of technology, i.e.
	the fact that there's an internet and podcasting and broadcasting and computers and microphones and all that kind of stuff, if I said that, I would reveal myself as a complete idiot.
	I may be verbally facile.
	I may be convincing.
	I may have lots of historical examples, but who gives a shit?
	Anybody with any brains would simply say, well, wait a minute.
	You're saying technology eliminates jobs, but you only have your job because of technology.
	So what are you talking about?
	Well, yes, but technology eliminates people from being fry cooks.
	Well, good!
	Who wants to be a fry cook?
	What a waste of human potential it is to be a fry cook.
	I hope technology does eliminate fry cookers so that people can go off and do something else.
	So technology, yeah, it eliminates jobs.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And you know what?
	When we cure cancer, a whole bunch of oncologists are going to have to retrain.
	Boo fucking hoo.
	Don't we want that?
	I mean, does anybody sit there and say, oh man, I can't believe that goddamn polio vaccine.
	Goddammit, all those people who made iron lungs, they're out of work now.
	They're unemployed.
	How do you feel about it, Alexander Salk, you selfish, life-saving bastard?
	You took people's livelihoods away, doctors who treated it, nurses who treated it, people who took care of these people for their whole lives, wheelchair manufacturers, iron lung manufacturers.
	You bastards.
	And what if this vaccine that's come out recently can actually prevent AIDS? Transmissions.
	You bastards.
	I mean, these poor people at the pharmaceutical companies who are producing these cocktails of medications to control the effects of AIDS, they will be out of a job.
	Ah!
	Monstrous.
	Monstrous.
	I mean, can you imagine when they come up with teleporters?
	How many gas station attendants will be out of a job?
	We better hold that technology back, because, you know, pumping gas is what people should be doing with their lives.
	Well, I don't think the Venus Project promotes holding back technology.
	I don't care what they promote or not, because...
	I understand what you mean.
	But what I do care about is if they say technology eliminates jobs...
	Oh, no, but they're not saying it in a negative way.
	No, but they're saying technology eliminates jobs.
	No, but they're not saying the whole point.
	The whole point of economics is the seen and the unseen, right?
	Yes, technology eliminates some jobs.
	I mean, so when I was a kid, my mom was a secretary.
	Now, how many executives have secretaries these days?
	Not many, because they got Outlook and they got email and they got voice dictation if they wanted and all that sort of stuff, right?
	And they can all type.
	So, secretariness has been eliminated, right?
	And good.
	Good, that means that they're free to do something else which actually adds wealth to society.
	Go be a scientist or an artist or add something to humanity.
	All right.
	Yeah, it doesn't have to be anything glorified.
	It could be anything.
	But now they can do something else which adds value to society because they don't need to waste their time doing this, right?
	Because this has now become a time waster in the same way that you and I don't need to waste our time growing and picking and cleaning our own food.
	So saying that technology eliminates jobs is just retarded.
	Because it doesn't say that technology frees up people for more profitable occupations.
	And that's the truth.
	It's as retarded as saying government spending creates jobs.
	Well, okay.
	Of course it does.
	But it's like saying, I shot a guy, so I've added to the wealth of the country because now the doctor has something to do.
	Great.
	Let's make that part of our economic plan.
	Shoot people in need so they need expensive rehab.
	Because look, that way the nurse gets paid.
	Stimulating the economy, right?
	Yeah, I mean, this is seen and the unseen.
	Government spending creates jobs and it destroys far more than it creates because you don't get to think or see of all the jobs that weren't created, blah-de-blah.
	I mean, this isn't even Econ 101.
	This is just common sense.
	Right?
	So the fact that people will say something as retarded as technology destroys jobs, it means to me that they don't understand anything about economics.
	They've not read any counter-opinions.
	They have not processed what is contrary to their viewpoint.
	And they won't say, well, the economic argument is X, Y, and Z. It's called the broken window fallacy.
	And all it takes is just run through Henry Hazlitt's economics in one lesson.
	You know, it's half an afternoon.
	It's not a big intellectual investment to make.
	Nobody's asking you to go get a PhD in economics, right?
	But it means that they're just not processing opinions that are contrary to their own.
	And they're not absorbing them and trying to understand them and trying to work with them.
	Right?
	I mean, I don't just wish things away.
	I try to find historical examples.
	I try to find rational arguments and so on.
	I don't just pretend schools of thought don't exist or just wish them away.
	It's irresponsible and it's amateur.
	And this stuff is all too important.
	All too important to be left to irresponsible amateurs.
	They get people killed.
	All right.
	Thanks, everyone, for a wonderful show.
	Thanks for this.
	I guess you'll be hearing some of this.
	Free Adam Kokesh.
	Free Adam Kokesh.
	Absolutely.
	And have a great week.
	I'll see you guys on Wednesday.
	I'm sorry, the Joe Rogan show is taking a little bit of time to come out, but he uses this weird wax cylinder to record stuff.
	And I think it mostly comes out as tiddlywink piano music.
	So it should bring Ayn Rand back from the dead for a quick dance.
	Anyway, have yourselves a great week.
	You don't know that joke if you don't know Ayn Rand.
	She loved her tiddlywink music.
	But have yourselves a great week, everyone.
	And please remember to donate for the show, to the show, about the show, with the show.
	FDR URL.com forward slash donate.
	And, oh yeah, check out the new vid at Intro to Libertarianism.
	Awesome.
	Libertarianism colon introduction.
	Please share that around.
	I think it's going to be quite helpful for others.

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